Management : "How long you think it would take?"

Me : "now this is a rough estimate, but I think building the back-end and database alone could take 6-months minimum"

Management : "WHAT ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT? YOU ARE NOT SERIOUS"

me : "its a big proj..."

Management : "I thought it will be something like 10 days, already told the client it can be done"

me : "but we are not ready"

Management : "how are we not ready? we already have the virtual 3D shop, and we can use this ready-to-deploy eCommerce service as our data base "
... "you need to figure this out, this is not acceptable" he continued

* 2 Days Later -talking to my direct boss *
Boss : "since you don't know how to do it..."

me : "what ? I didn't say I can't do it, all I said it will take six months"

Boss : "yeah yeah, anyway there is this studio, a professional polish studio, we called them and they can do it, we will sign a contract with them, this will let you focus on the front-end. good?"

me : "well alright then"

Boss : "please write a doc, explaining everything needed from the backend"
-to me that was the end of it, took a long time to tell me they made the deal-

* 5 Months later *
- "Abdu, can you come here for a minute..."
- "yes boss?"
- "the document we asked you to do for the Polish studio, did you specify that we needed an integration with the API we are using for eCommerce?"

scared to death I answered : "why of course I did!"
I ran to my PC to check it out because I didn't know, I forgot because no one even comment on my doc. I check it out, and it was clearly explained... I got relaxed...

turns out they didn't even do what we asked them for. took them 5 months, and with no communication whatsoever. all their work was useless to us. complete dump waste.

----------------
never mentioned this until a year later... in a heat of moment when they were asking me to make an impossible task with no men and no time... I reminded them of this story... management didn't like it. but it was the truth. they didnt push this crazily this time

Father bought a PC in 1997. Back then very few had it. I learned doing things like accessing the internet and sending emails, among others. I remember having added age on websites to be allowed to sign up at times :P My sisters used to play games on it sometimes. The first few ones we had were Tomb Raider: The Last Revelation, Tomb Raider Chronicles, American McGee's Alice(Which caused us to upgrade the PC xD)... And some others.

I have a memory of this pseudo-3D-looking game where you move in a maze and try answering questions. I want to remember its name, but I cannot :(

We literally have video evidence of me liking the computer as a child, yet my parents either say I'm addicted or deny I've ever liked it before. Not only that, but continuously limiting my time with the PC hasn't been a literal obstacle in my way of trying to do things in their opinion. Funny how my parents think the last few years I've been my worst when they've hurt me in those years so much that our relationship is guaranteed not working out. There were doubts in my head before, but now it's cemented and there is no way of going back. Father, for example, tells me it's too late to do anything with a PC now(As well as how I've been unable to use the PC. He looks at these pro players' footage in some TV show and he's like, „You've been unable to use your hobbies“, as if they have never ever screamed at me for perceived gaming and not actually cared to check), and I need to look for a „real“ job.

Sorry. I went to bed at 2:00 in the morning. Feel like a zombie because of ongoing weirdly insufficient sleep, even though I sleep kinda more than normal. Even when I took Melatonine for that it didn't help at all.

Childhood was where beating began. I was about 6/7. Right when I entered school. The first school that I attended was a private one and supposedly for „Wunderkinds“, while in reality I haven't seen a SINGLE teacher or psychologist approve of it, their argument being that children were basically drowned in work that wasn't age-appropriate(I don't mean anything bad. Just that teaching about Galaxies and all in first grade isn't the brightest idea). There was always a mountain of homework to do and as opposed to some other countries, we had to do it on a day to day basis. We didn't have a week-long deadline. I was predictably not keeping up with it as I could have, had it been a normal amount, so my parents decided I didn't want to study and began their methods of getting me to „study“. I have yet to see a person able to keep up with that school's tempo, no matter the age.

This place was also where I got bullied. I felt I had nowhere to be: At home, the parents' situation, at school, the bully. I never really went outside to play with other children, so I missed that part of childhood.

After the second year of school I was transferred to an advanced German school, called like that because they taught German and not English there. I also got to learn a bit of Russian before they removed it from school. In that period I used to attend ballet. But for less than a year. And piano, which I remember having attended for quite a long while, some years, if my memory isn't fried. I quit it because of it having been forced on me. Last piece I ever played fully was Beethoven's Marmotte.

In this school I was once again the outcast of the class. I had some people to interact with. All of those interactions lasted a few years at most. Then, because of a part of my class choosing me as a laughing-stock N2 and another girl as the N1, I found my best friend, who I still have today. She's the only friend I have nearby.

Most of the time I hated myself. Even today I struggle with that sometimes.

After that came university. This us where I got something like a friend circle at last. But it still didn't last. I got in a relationship with one of the guys, but I was just attracted. There was another I couldn't dare getting close to. Turns out he also had something for me. Then he disappeared from our lives and a year after, I still cannot forget the person. If I want to, I have to deprive myself of my own personality. Not a thing I'm willing to give up. Then I broke up with the guy I was in a relationship with and completely disappeared from the friendship circle. To be honest, I had reasons to. They refused to even try to look for the guy and they called him a friend for years. Sometimes parents hitting me can occur even today, but if I REALLY piss them off.

Now I'm here and oh, my God, I'm officially am aunt now! My sister gave birth to a daughter this morning... She's in Berlin with mother and both she and the child are doing great. I just hope she manages to be a good mother.

Tips for all the programmers out there:

- A programmer is not a PC repair man, just no one seems to remember about that

- Programming is thinking, not typing.
Counting starts from zero, not one.

- Even after completing a degree and courses and working on IT projects, learning never stops. If you want to stay competitive you should also work on personal projects that force you to use languages and software you never work with on the job.

- You don’t need serious math skills to be a developer. However, you’ll need basic algebra, logic, strong problem-solving skills, and most of all, patience.
- You don’t need a degree to be a developer - programming is like almost any profession: if you’re good at it, people will pay you for your skills, regardless of how you got there.

- Sleeping with a problem, can actually solve it.

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.

The programmer and the interns part 3.

Many of you asked me to keep posting about the interns that I'm responsible for.

I had the intention but never had the time or the energy. Since the interns only kept doing stupid, unthinkable things and just filtering out the good ones is a task of its own.

Time has passed, some interns left us by their choice, others were fired (for obvious reasons). Some stayed loyal and were given permanent positions. New ones joined. I no longer am directly responsible for their wellbeing, yet, somehow I am still their tech-lead and the developer of their tools.

Without further delay,

Case 0:
New guy get's into the internship, has his LinkedIn title set to ‘HTML Technician’.
Didn’t know about the existence of HTML5.
Been building static web pages in the early 2000s. The kind with embedded, inline CSS.
Claims that he is about to finish an engineering degree (sadly I believe him).
Fails the entry level Linux test. Complains about the similarity of the answer options.
Fails the basic web-standars test because "they change so fast, but the foundation is HTML and it's rock-solid!".
Get's caught taking home onions and milk from the kitchen.
Is spotted eating in a restaurant under our offices in his day off. Thrice. He lives a 30 minute drive away and comes here on a bicycle or by bus.
Apparently didn't know that the scrolling wheel on the mouse is clickable.
Said that his PC experience is mostly from his PlayStation (PC = PlayCtation apparently).
Get's fired, says that he'll go to the press. Never does.

Case 1:
Yet another new intern. He seems very eager to learn and work, capable, even charismatic. Has an impressive CV.
Does nothing.
Learns from the "case 0" guy and spends time with him until he is fired.
Comes to work at 8:00 AM and immediately goes to sleep on an office puff. In front of everyone.
Keeps dining alone, without a notice, at different times, for hours. Sometimes brings food into the office and loudly eats it there.
On his evening shifts keeps disappearing for long periods of time. Apparently drinking in the nearby bars and hitting on girls.
Keeps bragging about his success with getting their numbers and rants about those who reject him.
For over a year he fails his final training test and remains a trainee, without the ability to work on a real case.
Not fired yet.

Case 2:
Company retreat. Beautiful, exotic views, warm sun beams, all inclusive package for everyone on a huge half-island.
Simon (he's still with us, now as a true engineer!) brings his MacBook to the beach in order to work and impress all others.
Everybody get's drunk and start throwing huge inflatable balls at each other. One hits his laptop and it immediately is flattened.
Upset Simon is going in circles and ranting about the situation, looking for a solution.
Loses his phone on the beach.
Takes his broken laptop with him while searching for the phone.
Dips the laptop in the river while drunkenly ducking in order to pick a clam.

Case 3:
Still company retreat.
Drunk intern makes out with an employee's drunk wife.
Huge verbal fight. The husband says that he files for a divorce. Intern get's fired.

Case 4:
Still company retreat.
Three interns each take an inflatable swimming mattress and drift with the current. Get found on the other side of the resort three hours later, with red skin and severely dehydrated.

Case 5:
Still company retreat.
The 'informally fired' intern gets drunk again, climbs through a window into a room and makes out with an employee's drunk wife.
Again, gets caught when the husband returns to find a locked door but can see them though the window.

Case 6:
Still company retreat.
We all get ferociously drunk and wander off to the unknown in search of more booze.
Everybody does something stupid and somebody finds Simon's phone.
Simon is lost.
Frenzied horde of drunks is roaming the half-island in search of ethanol and the lost comrade.
Simon's phone get's permanently lost.
Five people step on sea urchins but find that out only hours later and then are unable to walk.
The mob, now including more drunk people who joined voluntarily, finds the sexually active intern making out with the enraged employee's wife yet again.
Surprisingly Simon is found sleeping in a room nearby.

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

Got the following phone call 10 minutes later:

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

"Nope. They were PC updates."

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

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

"Invalid password"

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

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

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

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

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

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

I’m a senior dev at a small company that does some consulting. This past October, some really heavy personal situation came up and my job suffered for it. I raised the flag and was very open with my boss about it and both him and my team of 3 understood and were pretty cool with me taking on a smaller load of work while I moved on with some stuff in my life. For a week.

    Right after that, I got sent to a client. “One month only, we just want some presence there since it’s such a big client” alright, I guess I can do that. “You’ll be in charge of a team of a few people and help them technically.” Sounds good, I like leading!

    So I get here. Let’s talk technical first: from being in a small but interesting project using Xamarin, I’m now looking at Visual Basic code, using Visual Studio 2010. Windows fucking Forms.

    The project was made by a single dev for this huge company. She did what she could but as the requirements grew this thing became a behemoth of spaghetti code and User Controls. The other two guys working on the project have been here for a few months and they have very basic experience at the job anyways. The woman that worked on the project for 5 years is now leaving because she can’t take it anymore.

    And that’s not the worse of it. It took from October to December for me to get a machine. I literally spent two months reading on my cellphone and just going over my shitty personal situation for 8 hours a day. I complained to everyone I could and nothing really worked.

    Then I got a PC! But wait… no domain user. Queue an extra month in which I could see the Windows 7 (yep) log in screen and nothing else. Then, finally! A domain user! I can log in! Just wait 2 extra weeks for us to give your user access to the subversion rep and you’re good to go!

    While all of this went on, I didn’t get an access card until a week ago. Every day I had to walk to the reception desk, show my ID and request they call my boss so he could grant me access. 5 months of this, both at the start of the day and after lunch. There was one day in particular, between two holidays, in which no one that could grant me access was at the office. I literally stood there until 11am in which I called my company and told them I was going home.

    Now I’ve been actually working for a while, mostly fixing stuff that works like crap and trying to implement functions that should have been finished but aren’t even started. Did I mention this App is in production and being used by the people here? Because it is. Imagine if you will the amount of problems that an application that’s connecting to the production DB can create when it doesn’t even validate if the field should receive numeric values only. Did I mention the DB itself is also a complete mess? Because it is. There’s an “INDEXES” tables in which, I shit you not, the IDs of every other table is stored. There are no Identity fields anywhere, and instead every insert has to go to this INDEXES table, check the last ID of the table we’re working on, then create a new registry in order to give you your new ID. It’s insane.

   

    And, to boot, the new order from above is: We want to split this app in two. You guys will stick with the maintenance of half of it, some other dudes with the other. Still both targeting the same DB and using the same starting point, but each only working on the module that we want them to work in. PostmodernJerk, it’s your job now to prepare the app so that this can work. How? We dunno. Why? Fuck if we care. Kill you? You don’t deserve the swift release of death.

    Also I’m starting to get a bit tired of comments that go  ‘THIS DOESN’T WORK and ‘I DON’T KNOW WHY WE DO THIS BUT IT HELPS and my personal favorite  ‘??????????????????????

Tldr :
Office Building : 1
Population: 5000
Number of PC users: 5000
No of Spare mice: 0

Day 1:
Training period commences.
My mouse laser sensor doesn't work.

Solution: Use this mouse to log in to your system.
Open the company portal.
Connect to vpn.
Enter username password.
Create a ticket for mouse replacement.
Done.

Day 3
I bring my own mouse.
Confiscated at security.
Becomes a security violation.

Day 9
I get a call from helpdesk.
Agent- what is the problem?
Me- my mouse is not working.
Agent- why?
Me- what do you mean? Something is wrong with the sensor.
Agent- clean the sensor.
Disconnects call.
Marks ticket as resolved.
Me- WTF just happened!

Naturally, I escalate the issue.

Day 15
Level 2 Agent- what happened? Why have you escalated the issue?
Me- I need a mouse, waiting since 2 weeks.
Him- No mouse is available
Me- you don't have a single spare mouse available in an office with 5000 PC users?
Him- no they're out of stock.
Me- when will it be back in stock?
Him- we will 'soon' launch a tender for quotations from sellers.
Me- time?
Him- 1 week.

Day 34

I email the head of supplies for the city office. Next day I get a used super small mouse, which doesn't have a left button. Anyways, I've given up hope now.

Day 45
I become a master at keyboard shortcuts.
Finish my training.
Get transferred to another city.
No mouse till date.

Surprisingly, this was one of the top recruiters in my country. Never knew, MNCs can be so so inefficient for such simple tasks.
Start-ups are way better in this regard. Latest tech, small community, minimal bureaucracy and a lot of respect and things to learn.

So everyone is sharing their work again, so here is mine.
And no 6 monitors, 1 pc isn't overkill.

Well...

Maybe...

But just a little!

Usually, one is spotify, one iChrome, one development (center bottom), one execution of dev, one email&facebook split and one documentation.

Lamer rant

For a really long time I said to myself that this is too basic to rant about but lately it became so frequent and extreme that here is my rant about completely clueless users that ask me IT related questions.

Disclaimer: Said users are people that I generally can't avoid. Distant family members, neighbors and etc.

Case 0:
U: I don't know what's happening!! The computer doesn't work!!
M: What do you mean?
U: There's no Facebook! And everything is stuck and no messenger!!!
M: The WiFi on your laptop was off. I turned it on. Still, this doesn't mean that the pc wasn't working.
U: I don't understand this shit!!!

Case 1:
U: I hate this computer!!! It never works!!! Help meeee!!!
M: What now?
U: Where did the internet disappear?!
M: (assuming it's wifi or browser related)
Actually user moved the Chrome window to bottom-right corner and lost it.

Every time I try to show the user how I resolve the issue the user yells that there are too many steps, that they are complicated and that I'm a bad teacher and doing it too fast.

Case 2:
U: My computer is so slow! It barely can load google translate! And I can't listen to music on youtube!! Shitty laptop! It's you! Your computers in the apartment drain everything!!!
M: You have no idea what you are talking about.
U: My husband told me that your computers are heavy and drain everything!
M: What exactly did he tell you that my devices drain?
U: I don't know! All the energy! I believe him! He knows!
M: My computers drain less electricity than your vacuum and I have a separate internet connection. Not only we share nothing but also I drain nothing.
U: Since you appeared all the computers are slow!!!!

Fkk...

Case 3:
U: I don't understand, where is my whatsapp?
M: You can't locate the app on your phone?
U: Yes! F*ck, help me! I'm so angry and I really need this NOW!!!
M: Shut up. I'm already here and helping.
(I open users phone and whatsapp is the active app...)
U: I can' t find my whatsapp with Clara!

F*ck you! F*ck you! Ghckjfshij!!!

Case 4:
(crazy hitting on my door)
U: I don't have THE internet!!!
It's you again! You took all of THE internet!!!
M: No, it doesn't work like that. Your provider is bad, your package is cheap and your cables are of low quality.
U: I need THE internet immediately!!! Stop playing with your typing and fix the facebook or I'll cut the power cables to the house!!

I can go on, just don't think that recalling all those events is healthy for me.

Dad calls:
D: Hai, so, um, my pc's not booting up.
Me: So?
D: What do I do now?
M: You tried fixin' it?
D: That's why I'm calling you.
M: I'm 400km away from you. Does it do anything by pressing a power-on button?
D: No. But I touched it, it's really hot.
M: When was the last time you cleaned that shit up?
D: I have to clean it?
*PC is located at dusty environment at work. 5 years old and is being turned on 6 days a week*

Clean. Your. Pc.
Oh, and yeah, it overheated, burned the mbo, power suply, and cpu cooler stopped spinning.
It's like Satan threw a curse on a pc, and took a piss on it.
The best part? He's mad because I "never help him nor have time when he needs something to be fixed".
He can fix the PC in a pc shop that is across the street.

So, you doin' any better this week?

I just feel that I have to get this of my chest, because this have really me and my family really negative.
It have destroyed my will to be happy, sort of.

Well, my father have some kind of control behaviour. My whole life he has been angry on stuff that does not really matter
and I have always been the one that get all the shit - because I am the oldest. I was never allowed (maybee 3-4 times between age 8-15) to have any friends
over or stay with friends over night or after school. Because they "where bad and I would become like them".

I am happy that I meet my wife 6 years ago and moved away from home when I was 20, I kinda fled the situation from home to start my own life.
My father has always hated when boy/men had long hair and alot of beard - but that is something I always wanted to have. So when I moved from home
I start to let everything grow.

Two years ago, things got really fucked up when I did not shave all my beard of and cut down my hair because my mom had birthday. I did it the week after
because my brother graduated from school and we where going to visit, we did not want a repeat the situation from a couple of weeks before. After that I got
another job as a Linux sysadmin and started to grow the hair and beard again.

Last monday, my dad called and said that I am not welcome to visit them anymore. I am a "bad example" for my sibling
and he also said "you brother and sister does not feel so good (my sister fainted a couple of days before, which I did not know) so I have no time to care about you and your family"
I was stunned, I really wish that this was a joke but it is'nt.

I have always been bashed because of the choices I make in my life and for my own family (wife, and two kids + one more kid any day now)

When I choose to work with something that I love, they said that I am stupid because they basically think "that the PC is full of SATAN".
When they realized that I make more money than my parents combined they went silent.

I just wanted to write this shit of my chest, it is really fucked up and I am starting to loose the ability to have feelings - if you know what I mean.

Thank you devrant, for being one of the fun things I do, when I read all the rage, fucked up stories, hate, and so on. I do not feel alone :)

PS: I promise you, that you guys/gals will be the first one to know when my new kiddo arrives

Wife: the neighbors brought their pc, it doesn't work.

Me: WTF did I say to you. I DON'T REPAIR ANYTHING NO PCS, PRINTERS, WASHMACHINES NOTHING TELL THEM TO GET THE FUCKING PC GODDAMIT ITS MY FREE DAY FOR THE LOVE OF GOD.

Scammers mann:
——————————————-
“Hello sir, you have to renew your subscription before tomorrow else you’ll be charged $299.99 from your bank account.”

Me: And what’s this subscription you’re talking?

“Your Microsoft antivirus subscription, sir.”

Me: Oh wow, and when did I subscribe to this?

“Three years ago, sir.”

Me: lmbo. Please find someone else to scam.

“No sir, it shows here that you subscribed to Microsoft antivirus 3 years ago.”

Me: Dude, I was in college three years ago. I was too broke to be subscribing to useless stuff like this.

“But sir, its an antivirus. You subscribed to protect your Windows PC from viruses, malware so that bad people and hackers don’t get into your computer to do bad things and steal your info.”

Me: Well, what a coincidence. You’re describing yourself except you’re trying to attack my bank account not my pc. And oh, I’ve been using Linux for the past 5 years and currently own a MacBook so good luck finding someone to fall for this.

“Oh, I see. Sorry.”

*Scammer hangs up.

Lmbo, like dude seriously?

Unfortunately though, someone at my work mother fell for this and had to close all her accounts and create new ones.

Navy story continued.
And continuing from the arp poisoning and boredom, I started scanning the network...
So I found plenty of WinXP computers, even some Win2k servers (I shit you not, the year was 201X) I decided to play around with merasploit a bit. I mean, this had to be a secure net, right?
Like hell it was.
Among the select douchebags I arp poisoned was a senior officer that had a VERY high idea for himself, and also believed he was tech-savvy. Now that, is a combination that is the red cloth for assholes like me. But I had to be more careful, as news of the network outage leaked, and rumours of "that guy" went amok, but because the whole sysadmin thing was on the shoulders of one guy, none could track it to me in explicit way. Not that i cared, actually, when I am pissed I act with all the subtleness of an atom bomb on steroids.
So, after some scanning and arp poisoning (changing the source MAC address this time) I said...
"Let's try this common exploit, it supposedly shouldn't work, there have been notifications about it, I've read them." Oh boy, was I in for a treat. 12 meterpreter sessions. FUCKING 12. The academy's online printer had no authentication, so I took the liberty of printing a few pages of ASCII jolly rogers (cute stuff, I know, but I was still in ITSec puberty) and decided to fuck around with the other PCs. One thing I found out is that some professors' PCs had the extreme password of 1234. Serious security, that was. Had I known earlier, I could have skipped a TON of pointless memorising...
Anyway, I was running amok the entire network, the sysad never had a chance on that, and he seemed preoccupied with EVERYTHING ELSE besides monitoring the net, like fixing (replacing) the keyboard for the commander's secretary, so...
BTW, most PCs had antivirus, but SO out of date that I didn't even need to encode the payload or do any other trick. An LDAP server was open, and the hashed admin password was the name of his wife. Go figure.
I looked at a WinXP laptop with a weird name, and fired my trusty ms08_067 on it. Passowrd: "aaw". I seriously thought that Ophcrack was broken, but I confirmed it. WTF? I started looking into the files... nothing too suspicious... wait a min, this guy is supposed to work, why his browser is showing porn?
Looking at the ""Deleted"" files (hah!) I fount a TON of documents with "SECRET" in them. Curious...
Decided to download everything, like the asshole I am, and restart his PC, AND to leave him with another desktop wallpaper and a text message. Thinking that he took the hint, I told the sysadmin about the vulnerable PCs and went to class...
In the middle of the class (I think it was anti-air warfare or anti-submarine warfare) the sysad burst through the door shouting "Stop it, that's the second-in-command's PC!".
Stunned silence. Even the professor (who was an officer). God, that was awkward. So, to make things MORE awkward (like the asshole I am) I burned every document to a DVD and the next day I took the sysad and went to the second-in-command of the academy.
Surprisingly he took the whole thing in quite the easygoing fashion. I half-expected court martial or at least a good yelling, but no. Anyway, after our conversation I cornered the sysad and barraged him with some tons of security holes, needed upgrades and settings etc. I still don't know if he managed to patch everything (I left him a detailed report) because, as I've written before, budget constraints in the military are the stuff of nightmares. Still, after that, oddly, most people wouldn't even talk to me.
God, that was a nice period of my life, not having to pretend to be interested about sports and TV shows. It would be almost like a story from highschool (if our highschool had such things as a network back then - yes, I am old).
Your stories?

*goes to the local town hall to get my new ID*

A week ago:
Clerk: Sorry sir, our systems don't work anymore, we can't process your request!
Me: Epic. Is there any sysadmin in here that can fix this pronto?
C: No it's a centrally managed system. It's managed by the people in ${another town}.
M (thinking): Well how about you fucking call them then, fucking user. Screaming blood and fire when nothing is wrong server-side but doing nothing when there is. Fucking amazing, useless piece of shit.

One week later, i.e. today:
M: Hey, I'd like to renew my ID card. I've got this announcement document here and my current ID card.
C: Oh no I don't need the announcement document. I need your PIN and PUK code letter.
M (thinking): What the fuck do you need that for.. isn't that shit supposed to be my private information..?
*gives PIN and PUK part of the letter*
C: Alright, to register your new ID card, please enter your PUK and then your PIN in this card reader here twice.
M: Sure, but I'd like to change both afterwards. After all they're written on this piece of paper and I'm not sure that just destroying that will be enough.
C: Sure sure you can change them. Please authenticate with the codes written on the paper.
*Authenticates*
C: So you'd like to change your codes, right?
M: Yeah but I'd like to change it at home. You know, because I can't know for sure that this PC here is secure, the card reader has a wired connection to your PC (making it vulnerable to keyloggers) and so on.
C: Impossible. You can't change your PIN at home. (What about the PUK?!)
M: But I've done that several times with my Digipass for my previous passport.. it is possible and I've done it myself.
C: Tut tut, impossible. I know it's impossible and therefore it is.
M (thinking): Thanks for confirming that I really shouldn't enter my personal PIN on your fucking PC, incompetent bitch.
M: Alright, I'll just keep this PIN, try at home and if it's really impossible because the system changed to remove this functionality (which I highly doubt, that'd be really retarded), I'll come back later.
(Just to get rid of this old stupid woman's ignorance essentially.)
C: Sure sure...
Me: I'd also like to register as an organ donor. Where can I do that?
C: That'd be over there. *points to the other room in the town hall*

FUCKING THANK YOU LORDS OF THE WICKED RAVEN AND THE LIBERATED TUX, TO GET ME AWAY FROM THAT STUPID FUCKING BITCH!!!

.. anyway. I've got my new ID and I'm an official organ donor now 🙂

"Hey nephew, why doesn't the FB app work. It shows blank white boxes?"
- It can't connect or something? (I stopped using the FB app since 2013.)

"What is this safe mode that appeared on my phone?!"
- I don't know. I don't hack my smartphone that much. Well, I actually do have a customised ROM. But stop! I'm pecking my keyboard most of the time.

"Which of my files should I delete?"
- Am I supposed to know?

"Where did my Microsoft Word Doc1.docx go?"
- It lets you choose the location before you hit save.

"What is 1MB?"
- Search these concepts on Google. (some of us did not have access to the Internet when we learned to do basic computer operations as curious kids.)

"What should I search?"
- ...

"My computer doesn't work.. My phone has a virus. Do you think this PC they are selling me has a good spec? Is this Video Card and RAM good?"
- I'm a programmer. I write code. I think algorithmically and solve programming problems efficiently. I analyse concepts such as abstraction, algorithms, data structures, encapsulation, resource management, security, software engineering, and web development. No, I will not fix your PC.

When you let your partner at work borrow your laptop... 🤔🤔

My last wk93 story, the time we discovered school faculty was spying on students and we uncovered student's deepest secrets.

I call it, kiddiegate.

So if you've read my past rants you've noticed I did some pretty childish and reckless stuff with my highschool's systems when I was younger, but nothing compares to this thing.

After resetting the sysadmin account pwd on some machines it occurred to me I could write a keylogger to capture teachers Moodle accounts and so on, I decided to try it out on a regular lab computer first.

Imagine my surprise when I found a hidden keylogger already installed! I couldn't believe it but then I thought, what if other PC's have it? So I recruited my mates and teached them the process to check if a PC had been infected...ALL PCs were, over 30 computers we checked had been logging for over 3 months! That damn sysadmin! >:[

We were shocked and angry, but then I thought "hey. . . My work has been done for me, better take advantage"

So we did, we extracted each log and then removed it from the PCs along with the keyloggers. There were hundreds of records and then one day we started snooping into the fb accounts of some students (we shouldn't have) we uncovered so many nasty, shocking secrets...

One of the school's lady's man had a drunk one nighter with one of our gay friends, the most secluded and shy guy was sexting like crazy with 15 chicks at the same time, things like that...we promised to never say a word and deleted the logs.

After that we didn't do much and continued highschool as every teenage minor should, getting drunk and avoiding responsibilities, though we could never see many of our classmates the same way. The sysadmin was fired shortly after I graduated, no reason was stablished.

I want to clear out we were minors and laws in my country weren't clearly stablished at the time plus no harm was ever done. I don't condone hacking or any kind of illegal activity, just thought I'd share.

The stupid stories of how I was able to break my schools network just to get better internet, as well as more ridiculous fun. XD

1st year:
It was my freshman year in college. The internet sucked really, really, really badly! Too many people were clearly using it. I had to find another way to remedy this. Upon some further research through Google I found out that one can in fact turn their computer into a router. Now what’s interesting about this network is that it only works with computers by downloading the necessary software that this network provides for you. Some weird software that actually looks through your computer and makes sure it’s ok to be added to the network. Unfortunately, routers can’t download and install that software, thus no internet… but a PC that can be changed into a router itself is a different story. I found that I can download the software check the PC and then turn on my Router feature. Viola, personal fast internet connected directly into the wall. No more sharing a single shitty router!

2nd year:
This was about the year when bitcoin mining was becoming a thing, and everyone was in on it. My shitty computer couldn’t possibly pull off mining for bitcoins. I needed something faster. How I found out that I could use my schools servers was merely an accident.
I had been installing the software on every possible PC I owned, but alas all my PC’s were just not fast enough. I decided to try it on the RDS server. It worked; the command window was pumping out coins! What I came to find out was that the RDS server had 36 cores. This thing was a beast! And it made sense that it could actually pull off mining for bitcoins. A couple nights later I signed in remotely to the RDS server. I created a macro that would continuously move my mouse around in the Remote desktop screen to keep my session alive at all times, and then I’d start my bitcoin mining operation. The following morning I wake up and my session was gone. How sad I thought. I quickly try to remote back in to see what I had collected. “Error, could not connect”. Weird… this usually never happens, maybe I did the remoting wrong. I went to my schools website to do some research on my remoting problem. It was down. In fact, everything was down… I come to find out that I had accidentally shut down the schools network because of my mining operation. I wasn’t found out, but I haven’t done any mining since then.

3rd year:
As an engineering student I found out that all engineering students get access to the school’s VPN. Cool, it is technically used to get around some wonky issues with remoting into the RDS servers. What I come to find out, after messing around with it frequently, is that I can actually use the VPN against the screwed up security on the network. Remember, how I told you that a program has to be downloaded and then one can be accepted into the network? Well, I was able to bypass all of that, simply by using the school’s VPN against itself… How dense does one have to be to not have patched that one?

4th year:
It was another programming day, and I needed access to my phones memory. Using some specially made apps I could easily connect to my phone from my computer and continue my work. But what I found out was that I could in fact travel around in the network. I discovered that I can, in fact, access my phone through the network from anywhere. What resulted was the discovery that the network scales the entirety of the school. I discovered that if I left my phone down in the engineering building and then went north to the biology building, I could still continue to access it. This seems like a very fatal flaw. My idea is to hook up a webcam to a robot and remotely controlling it from the RDS servers and having this little robot go to my classes for me.

What crazy shit have you done at your University?

Today, I was told to investigate why the software doesn't work on "some" computers. I had no previous experience with that particular software but I just had to make some tests... easy, right? As soon as I ran the software, my computer crashed (I literally had to restart the pc). I asked my colleagues if I did something wrong but the set up seemed ok.

Later, in a random discussion about the software I found out it does "a little memory allocation". I opened the performance tab in task manager and ran the software again. In an instant, the RAM went from 1.3GB to 7.66GB (my pc has 8GB of RAM).

In an attempt to find how such a monstrosity was creater, I found out the developer that made the software had 16GB of RAM on his pc.

I have found something that eats RAM more than Chrome... brace yourselves.

so here's a little story:

yesterday i decided to buy a shiny new gtx 1070 since my pc is getting very old, i come back from the store and i realize that my case is slightly too small to fit the card.
'No bg deal' i think to myself, i run out to buy a saw and after some work i made some space to fit the card in by sawing off some hard drive bays i was not using. I plug in the card, i wire up the pc, and it does not boot: after some asking around (i have never really built a pc before), i relaize i need more power to the card and wire a second PCIE connector. low and behold, i power of the pc and it works! Once logged into windows tho, i realize none of my HHDs are detected...

To cut a long story short, i **did not think to unplug the hard drives before i started sawing off bits of the case and the vibrations killed both of them!** i lost ~1TB of data in the process: a lot of it was games and programs, but i have yet to tally up the damage.

I am completely bamboozled by what the fuck just happened, i think i'll go hand myself in to the nearest police station for crimes against technology... or maybe a mental clinic would be best?...

PS: my system drive was spared since its an SSD, but i may as well re-install windows at this point since i lost 90% of my software

This rant means YOU if you are one of those people that "fix" their family's computers.

I was visiting my family over the holidays and while I managed to stay away from fixing their computers for the most time, I offered to help my grandfather to update the Garmin navigation device he wanted to gift my father. (They do not use smartphones for navigation, and my father doesn't want "these modern shitty phones".)

When booting up my grandfather's laptop, I realized something odd: Linux Mint boot screen. Wut?

And immediately I said: "It could be impossible to update your navigation device on this laptop."

As true enough, the Garmin Express update software requires either a Windows PC or a Mac; and even though I vaguely hoped it might be possible to upgrade through Linux, I just could not be bothered to find out that day.

What I wondered though is why did my grandfather of all people ran Linux!?

Don't get me wrong, I use Linux myself on my work machine and I never want to work with something else when coding; yet my grandfather is an end user of the show-me-where-and-what-and-how-often-to-click-kind.

What could he gain by it?

As it turns out, the computer nerd's friend of my uncle managed his PC. And my uncle and he decided unanimously my grandfather should better run Linux. Is it something my grandfather needs? No. BUT IT'S RIGHT! Suck it up! (My father's laptop therefore also runs Linux Mint. So he can't upgrade his new device either.)

This is the ugly kind of entitled nerd-dom I truly detest.

When discussing things further, my grandfather told me that he had problems ever since with his printer. Under Windows, he knew how to print on the special photo paper. Under Linux, all he can barely manage is to print on normal papers. Shame, printing photos was the only thing he liked doing on that device. What did my uncle's friend tell him?

"Get a decent printer!"

Fuck that guy.

It's fine if Linux works for you, but before you install it on a PC of a relative, you better make sure it fits their needs! If you have that odd member that only wants to write letters, read emails, use facebook, and wants to play that browser game, feel free to introduce them to Linux.

Yet if they have any special wish, don't stand in their way.

If they want to do something that requires a certain OS, don't just decide for them that their desire is wrong, but help them achieve their goal. If you can't align that with your ideology, then get the fuck out of my way and stop "helping".

For some people, a computer is a device to achieve a certain goal, a work. They only get hindered by your ill-advised attempts at virtue signalling.

Worst WTF dev experience? The login process from hell to a well-fortified dev environment at a client's site.
I assume a noob admin found a list of security tips and just went like "all of the above!".

You boot a Linux VM, necessary to connect to their VPN. Why necessary? Because 1) their VPN is so restrictive it has no internet access 2) the VPN connection prevents *your local PC* from accessing the internet as well. Coworkers have been seen bringing in their private laptops just to be able to google stuff.
So you connect via Cisco AnyConnect proprietary bullshit. A standard VPN client won't work. Their system sends you a one-time key via SMS as your password.

Once on their VPN, you start a remote desktop session to their internal "hopping server", which is a Windows server. After logging in with your Windows user credentials, you start a Windows Remote Desktop session *on that hopping server* to *another* Windows server, where you login with yet another set of Windows user credentials. For all these logins you have 30 seconds, otherwise back to step 1.
On that server you open a browser to access their JIRA, GitLab, etc or SSH into the actual dev machines - which AGAIN need yet another set of credentials.

So in total: VM -> VPN + RDP inside VM -> RDP #2 -> Browser/SSH/... -> Final system to work on
Input lag of one to multiple seconds. It was fucking unusable.

Now, the servers were very disconnect-happy to prevent anything "fishy" going on. Sitting at my desk at my company, connected to my company's wifi, was apparently fishy enough to kick me out every 5 to 20 minutes. And that meant starting from step 1 inside the VM again. So, never forget to plugin your network cable.

There's a special place in hell for this admin. And if there isn't, I'll PERSONALLY make the devil create one. Even now that I'm not even working on this any more.

The tech stack at my current gig is the worst shit I’ve ever dealt with...

I can’t fucking stand programs, especially browser based programs, to open new windows. New tab, okay sure, ideally I just want the current tab I’m on to update when I click on a link.

Ticketing system: Autotask
Fucking opens up with a crappy piss poor sorting method and no proper filtering for ticket views. Nope you have to go create a fucking dashboard to parse/filter the shit you want to see. So I either have to go create a metric-arse tonne of custom ticket views and switch between them or just use the default turdburger view. Add to that that when I click on a ticket, it opens another fucking window with the ticket information. If I want to do time entry, it just feels some primal need to open another fucking window!!! Then even if I mark the ticket complete it just minimizes the goddamn second ticket window. So my jankbox-supreme PC that my company provided gets to strugglepuff along trying to keep 10 million chrome windows open. Yeah, sure 6GB of ram is great for IT work, especially when using hot steaming piles of trashjuice software!

I have to manually close these windows regularly throughout the day or the system just shits the bed and halts.

RMM tool: Continuum
This fucker takes the goddamn soggy waffle award for being utterly fucking useless. Same problem with the windows as autotask except this special snowflake likes to open a login prompt as a full-fuck-mothering-new window when we need to open a LMI rescue session!!! I need to enter a username and a password. That’s it! I don’t need a full screen window to enter credentials! FUCK!!! Btw the LMI tools only work like 70% of the time and drag ass compared to literally every other remote support tool I’ve ever used. I’ve found that it’s sometimes just faster to walk someone through enabling RDP on their system then remoting in from another system where LMI didn’t decide to be fully suicidal and just kill itself.

Our fucking chief asshat and sergeant fucknuts mcdoogal can’t fucking setup anything so the antivirus software is pushed to all client systems but everything is just set to the default site settings. Absolutely zero care or thought or effort was put forth and these gorilla spunk drinking, rimjob jockey motherfuckers sell this as a managed AntiVirus.

We use a shitty password manager than no one besides I use because there is a fully unencrypted oneNote notebook that everyone uses because fuck security right? “Sometimes it’s just faster to have the passwords at the ready without having to log into the password manager.” Chief Asshat in my first week on the job.

Not to mention that windows server is unlicensed in almost every client environment, the domain admin password is same across multiple client sites, is the same password to log into firewalls, and office 365 environments!!!

I’ve brought up tons of ways to fix these problems, but they have their heads so far up their own asses getting high on undeserved smugness since “they have been in business for almost ten years”. Like, Whoop Dee MotherFucking Doo! You have only been lucky to skate by with this dumpster fire you call a software stack, you could probably fill 10 olympic sized swimming pools to the brim with the logarrhea that flows from your gullets not only to us but also to your customers, and you won’t implement anything that is good for you, your company, or your poor clients because you take ten minutes to try and understand something new.

I’m fucking livid because I’m stuck in a position where I can’t just quit and work on my business full time. I’m married and have a 6m old baby. Between both my wife and I working we barely make ends meet and there’s absolutely zero reason that I couldn’t be providing better service to customers without having to lie through my teeth to them and I could easily support my family and be about 264826290461% happier!

But because we make so little, I can’t scrap together enough money to get Terranimbus (my startup) bootstrapped. We have zero expendable/savable income each month and it’s killing my soul. It’s so fucking frustrating knowing that a little time and some capital is all that stands between a better life for my family and I and being able to provide a better overall service out there over these kinds of shady as fuck knob gobblers.

About a year ago I switched my job.
At the start everything seemed like magic. I was the It director, I've finally was able to call the shots on technologies, on new software architecture.
First step was to check the current state of the company.
"qqqq" as each pc password? Ok
No firewall from outside? Lovely
Servers running on Windows Server 2008? Spectacular
People leaving pc on after work and left the machine unlocked just not to type the password? Hell yeah
The IT dude playing games instead of working? But ofcourse
Plaintext passwords publically accessible eshop? Naturally.
The list goes on and on.
After all this time, I'm working to fix every hole like that like crazy and because it doesn't show results, I'm soon to lose my job. Well better luck next time as an intern I guess :')

Story time:
Yesterday I wanted to go to the theater with my girlfriend. It was her idea because as a student you can get reduced tickets for the play, but only via the online store exactely two hours before the play starts. We had already tried two weeks before but with no success. So this time I said i want to be on my pc with a proper browser and not a mobile version like last time. So we are sitting at home me in front of their website on one screen and with a clock on the other screen. Two minutes realy i hit refresh and I get a selection for the reduced tickets, nice.

You would think.

After selecting the amount. ERROR: Can not get your tickets. I was like fuck they are already sold out because it's a popular play. But hey let's try again. I got one ticket but not the second one, okay strange lets try again, same ERROR again. WHAT the FUCK, no feedback what so ever. My girlfriend had then the idea that they maybe restricted the amount for reduced tickets to one (does not state this explicitly but hey lets give it a shot). Use second browser select one ticket. ERROR can not get you the amount of seats. Rage level near to a 1000 why did it work two minutes before but not anymore. Trying around for five more minutes finally got the second ticket.

Now the real fun begins.

Proceeding to checkout should not be that hard you would think, but you need to be registered for that. Okay so let's do that. The salutation is not required neither is the address for the tickets but you need to have a company name??!!!!! The fuck?? I am not self employed and neither are a most other people around here so why is this field mandatory? Beeing a little under stress I decided to found the "asdf" company with my girlfriend.

Now one would think checking out is easy. Not so fast.

After accepting the terms of service another ERROR, unable to accept your data. What data? I did not input anything new? Where does this come from? Ok never mind I am going to pay with credid card that must work!
ERROR: Internal paymentservice initialization failure! Sorry what? I thought maybe I was to long idle in this browser and they do not reserve the tickets for so long (which would be no surprise to me at this point). Let's try again. Nope same error.

Now my rage level was really over 9000 but we really wanted to go so I decided to call the customer SUPPORT. Or better to say I had a answering maching telling me for ten minutes how sorry they are that this takes so long, yeah you bet. Then and this is now really great: the support guy asks me: "What error do you see? Internal paymentservice initialization failure?" I was like, okay he knows this so they need to know how to handle it. FUCK NO. "Sorry I can't help you. This is our payment system maybe they (IT) are doing some maintenance I can't halp you. Call the theater directly good day." Sorry what just happened, you fuckers are the vendors for the tickets for nearly all big events around here and the theater explicitly states to call you for tickets but you can not help me? Like hell.

This process took 25 very frustrating minutes and I was really angry and wanted to quit, then I saw that there is also a paypal option which I had not tried. With very little hope i selected everything for the payment, registered with paypal and they told me I already had an account. So reactivated this five year old account payed with all the mobile passwords and tans to finally, after 30 fucking minutes, get a pdf file for a ticket. Repeated the last step for the second ticket and with some time left to get there we were off.

Me: I've been using ubuntu with i3 for 6 months. Is awesome. Everything works great.
Brain: Have you seen debian or arch linux. They're better than ubuntu. Just try' em
Me: Brain shut up. I don't have time to reinstall everything + I'll 100% fuck my pc up. I'll do it another time.
Brain: Trust me. I know what's better for you. Try it now
Me: No.
Brain: Pleeeeease.
Me: Ok fine.
Me: Now windows doesn't work, debian doesn't work. I need to format my hard drive and do this shit all over again.
Brain: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. Hey. Install arch linux.

This happend to me around 2 weeks ago. For some reason, I decied to post this now.

I won the lottery, yey! I mean, bot really, but I am <19yo student, "less than junior dev" in my office, but sonce I am the only one who is capable of working with hardware, I was working month back as a sysadmin for a few days. Our last sysadmin was really good working but really, really toxic guy, so he got fired on a spot after argument with some manager or whatever, no big deal, we could have another guy hired in a week. But, our backup server literally was on fire, all data probably dead because bad capacitor or whatever. This was our only backup of everything at the time. Everyone in full fucking panic mode, we had literally no other working HW we could use for backup, but then comes me, intern employed on his first dev job for 3 months. That day I bought some HW for my own personal server at home (Intel NUC with some Celeron, 4GB DDR4 RAM and two 240GB SSDs for RAID 1. My manager asked everyone in the office for sollution how to survive next 4 days before new server arrives. People there had no idea what tk do and no knowedgle about HW, I just came from a break and offered my components for a week, since there was noone else who can work with HW, servers and stuff like this, manager offered me $500+HW cost if I, random intern, can make it work. I installed Debian on that little PC, created RAID1 from both SSDs, installed MySQL server and mirrored GIT server from our last standing server (we had two before one of them went lit 🔥), made simple Python script to copy all data on that RAID, with some help of our database guy copied whole DB from production to this little computer and edited some PHP so every SQL request made on our server will run on that NUC too. Everything after ±2 hours worked perfectly. Untill a fucking PSU burned in our server and took RAID controller with him in sillicon heaven next night, so we could not access any data unltill we got a new one. Thanks to every god out there, I was able to create software RAID from survived HDDs on our production server and copy all data from that NUC on the servers software RAID and make it working at 3 AM in the night before an exam 😂. Without this, we would be next ±40 hours without aerver running and we might loose soke of our data and customers. So my little skill with Linux, Python, MySQL and most importantly my NUC hardware I got that day running as a backup server saved maybe whole company 😂.
Btw, guess who is now employee of the year with $2500 bonus? 😀
Sorry for bragging and log post, but I was so lucky an so happy when everything worked out, good luck to all sysadmins out there! 👍

TL:DR: Random intern saved company and made some money 😂

I started a job as a developer on Monday for a large retail company. There was no computer available for me because of the IT department but I'm told it will arrive later in the day. It doesn't.
On Tuesday I get told that the PC is coming and later in the day a keyboard, mouse, monitor stand and two monitors arrive but no computer.
Today, Wednesday, I get into work and find that I now have a PC. Woo! I load windows, log into my user account with my new user and pass and go to install VSCode only to find that I don't have admin privileges and can't install almost anything. I'm told that IT will add me to the admin user group soon(tm). I wait. All day. They don't do what they are supposed to do despite us pushing them to do it.
I hope that tomorrow I can actually dev, but at least I've been paid three days wage for doing nothing lol

Anyone have any shitty IT department stories?

OK I can't deal with this user anymore.

This morning I get a text. "My laptop isn't getting emails anymore I'm not sure if this is why?" And attached is a screenshot of an email purporting to be from "The <company name> Team". Which isn't even close to the sort of language our small business uses in emails. This email says that his O365 password will soon be expiring and he needs to download the attached (.htm) file so he can keep his password. Never mind the fact that the grammar is awful, the "from" address is cheesy and our O365 passwords don't expire. He went ahead and, in his words, "Tried several of his passwords but none of them worked." This is the second time in less than a year that he's done this and I thought we were very clear that these emails are never real, but I'll deal with that later.

I quickly log into the O365 admin portal and reset his password to a randomly-generated one. I set this to be permanent since this isn't actually a password he should ever be needing to type. I call him up and explain to him that it was a phishing email and he essentially just gave some random people his credentials so I needed to reset them. I then help him log into Outlook on his PC with the new password. Once he's in, he says "so how do I reset this temporary password?" I tell him that no, this is his permanent password now and he doesn't need to remember it because he shouldn't ever need to be typing it anyway. He says "No no no that won't work I can't remember this." (I smile and nod to myself at this point -- THAT'S THE IDEA). But I tell him when he is in the office we will store the password in a password manager in case he ever needs to get to it. Long pause follows. "Can't I just set it back to what it was so I can remember it?"

Hi,
I'm not a ranty person so I never actually thought I'd post anything here but here it goes.

From the beginning.
We use ancient technologies. PHP 5.2, Symfony 1.2 and a non RFC complient SOAP with NO documentation.
A year ago We've been thrown a new temporary project. An VOIP app for every OS.
That being iOS, Android, MAC, PC, Linux, Windows mobile. With a 3 month deadline. All that thrown at 4 PHP developers. The idea being that They'll take it, sign the delivery protocol, everyone happy. No more updates for the app needed. They get their funds they needed the app for and we get paid.

Fast forward to today...

Our dev team started the year with great news that We'll most likely have to create a new project. Since the amount of new features would be far greater than current feature set, we managed to finally force our boss to use newer technologies (ie. seperate backend symfony4 PHP7+/frontend react, rest api and so on). So we were ecstatic to say the least. With preestimates aimed at a minimum 3 month development period. Since we're comfortable with everything that needs to be done.
Two days later our boss came to me that one of our most annoying clients needs a new feature. Said client uses ancient version written on a napkin because They changed half of the specification 2 weaks before deadline in a software made not by a developer but some sysadmin who didn't know anything. His MVC model was practically VVV model since he even had sql queries in some views. Feature will take 3 days - fixing everything that will break in the meantime - 1-2 months.
F*** it, fine. A little overtime won't kill me.
Yesterday boss comes again... Apparently someone lost a delivery protocol for a project we ended that half a year ago. Whats even better at the time when we asked for hardware to test we never got any. When we asked about any testing enviornment - nothing. The app being SEMI-stable on everything is an overstatement but it was working on the os'es available at the time. Since the client started testing now again, it turns out that both Android app does not work on 8.1/9 and the iOS app does not work on ios12. The client obviously does not want to pay and we can do little with it without the protocol, other than rewriting the apps.
It will take months at least since all of those apps were written by people that didn't know neither the OS'es nor the languages. For example I started writing the iOS one in swift. Only to learn after half of the development time, that swift doesn't like working by C Library rules and I had to use ObjC also. With some C thrown in due to the library. 3 unknown languages, on an unknown platform in 3 months. I never had any apple device in my hand at that time nor do I intend to now. I'm astonished it worked out then. It was a clusterf**k of bad design and sticking everything together with deprecated apis and a gum. So I'll have to basically fully rewrite it.

If boss decides we'll take all those at the same time I'll f***ing jump of a bridge.

Let me tell you how shit flies in Aerospace&Defense companies in certain place in on earth

1. Your dev. PC is isolated from the internet. You can not download any software/library etc directly. "Legal" way takes literally days and you must all effort for it to work. I will not discuss the details of legal way but it is not asking IT team to download it for you, you do it yourself.

2. You use an archaic requirement standard that is somehow used by all other similar companies too. These companies f*ck each other in the arse when they are working on projects together(hiding details from each other which is necessary most of the times etc.) but they were kind to each other when it came to share shitty req. standard.

3. When you try to switch to new requirement standard, you waste weeks only to amend the old one, because everyone is using old one for all projects, so changing it would upset old guards in the company(which are people works in same project for 10 years, no personal development)
4. You came 1 minutes late, you fill the "minutely permission" form.

5. You already work long hours per day and they remove your small breaks during day, because developers use those breaks longer than intended(I wonder what might be the reason...)

6. A technology can not be adopted into current projects even it has objective advantages proven many times in the outer world, because old guards(developers), IT team and configuration management guys(poor man's dev ops role sometimes) can not change their ways.

I hate this shit...

Never EVER buy a Mac as your primary PC if you're a developer.

Back in 2014 I bought an iMac because I already had an iPhone, and being able to code on xCode and also have a Windows partition seemed perfect. It wasn't.

Soon enough, I started encountering issues. My storage was randomly filling up, my computer started getting slow despite me having a small number of start apps and still a lot of storage available, it was all a mess.

So - I installed Windows 10 using Bootcamp to use it as my main OS. All was great until I wanted a new partition of Windows so I can test some things out without damaging my stuff. I try multiple methods, none of which work because my disk is not in the right partition format, and I don't want to change it because I'd have to format the whole thing.

Whatever - I give up, and try going back to my normal partition, disappointed. Guess fucking what?! My Windows Boot was damaged! Yes, I shit you not!

So - not only was this absolute piece of shit not able to add just one more fucking partition with an OS on it, but it BROKE my main partition, and now I'm trying to recover it.

I've said it once and I'll say it again: Never EVER get a Mac as your primary computer, unless you only work on Mac/iPhone apps.

For paying 1300$, I was expecting a seamless experience with little to no issues - yet all I got is a computer that's fucking broken from it's very core.

Fuck you, Apple.

Listening to professor tell stories about when he used to develop, is like listening old war stories.

Back when I was in university, this teacher would tell us different stories about his days as a developer. This was one of the last ones, and I think it has not changed much since then.

*Phone rings*
Professor: Hello?

Client: I don't know what the fuck you take me for!

Professor: Oh, hello Client_Name. What seems to be the problem.

Client: This doesn't work! There's nothing here!

Professor: Ok, do you see the program file?

Client: No. I just said that there's nothing here.

They proceed to go over the issue and how to get the program to run. Or at least show up on the PC. This goes on for about 30 minutes.

Suddenly my professor has a thought.

Professor: Have you tried inserting the Floppy disk from the other side? Try flipping it.

Client: ...

CEO at work has a Mac elitist as a friend who somehow indoctrinated err I mean convinced him to get apple everywhere, now the most common issue is updating Microsoft products on the Mac.....

Mac elitist guys first name is Steve lol no lie, he also services the Macs which he expects to do so when no one is around, oh and did I mention he wants us to leave our passwords on our desks LOL, he doesn't work for the company and I really really don't trust him, glad I have a git repo, and I hope he doesn't delete anything on my PC (very reluctant to leave my password on my desk, so I may just convince everyone that my Mac is fine, which seems like it's doing it's thing)

!dev

This may be a petty rant, but It's been grinding my gears for a few months now... I fucking hate ads, it's starting to be incredibly ridiculous. You start a video... 2 ads... you watch for 2 minutes, another 2 ads (and no, adblock isn't a solution, that only works on PC, not devices)?!!! You start an App... ads, you listen to music... ads... you go to google... ads, you click a website... ads... you look out of your window... ads... you walk down the street... ads... ads.. ads...
Seriously, what the fuck have we done?!! As a society we fucked up so badly... Look, no matter how many times you offer me an ad for a furniture, I'm not going to buy a fucking furniture on just any random day. You are completely wasting my already limited time... If you don't have any ads to show me, then don't show me ads, fuck you, you fucking piece of shit software... How is it that it used to be enough to click away one static, non-intrusive ad, but now 6-8 15-20 second ads, popups and intrusive, mid-content ads are the norm?! And then a piece of shit like MoviePass DARES, FUCKING DARES, To work on some sort of camera-enabled check that you actually LOOK at the ads?!!!! ARE YOU FUCKING SHITTING ME?! WHO THE FUCK DO YOU THINK YOU ARE YOU RETARDED PIECE OF BLACK MIRROR SHIT, FUCK OFF WITH THIS BRAINWASHING BULLSHIT, I'M ALLERGIC TO IT, FUCK ALL OF THIS.

I fucking promise that any software I'll make will be either free and open source, or paid only by alternative means, no ads, not ever. I will never fucking add to this retarded bullshit. Never fucking ever will I lower myself on a level where I need to actively waste the time and psyche of thousands or millions of people to get money. Fucking hell.... As if the world doesn't suck enough already, we treat humans as cattle, and It's pissing me off... In the past I used to just delete any app that annoyed me with ads, but what the fuck do I do about youtube since it's the de-facto content source on the internet? And worse, my friends and family watch youtube.. even if I avoid it that doesn't mean the problem is solved... There needs to be an alternative, and paying subscriptions for every single fucking service on the web isn't a solution. Even worse with the current economy... I'd rather eat real food, than buy shit like premium on ShitTube, Fuckify, all the random news website I might read and every app or game I start once every two months... Shit like ad-less premium accounts aren't giving me an alternative, just a way to shoot myself in the foot longterm...

Godbless everyone that releases open source software, apps, tools, websites and such. I hope to god decentralized alternatives to youtube need to happen and not in the web3 way, because that's also retarded...

Fuck, Fuck, Fuck, Shit, Fuck Shit, Piss, Cocksucker, Motherfucker, Retards, Fucking absolutely disgusting pieces of shit... ... alright, I got it out of my system, but It's gonna be right back the next time YouTube forces me to look at 20 seconds of something I already skipped 48 times today...

For the love of god, I spent 2,5 hours debugging why Minecraft from the windows store doesn't work...

The game just shows a red message telling you it didn't work.

I checked the logs, nothing just warnings

I re-installed the game, nothing, same error

Updated java and all parts of the store, nothing....

Obviously I had to install Something called the "xbox identity Provider"... You know... On a PC... For a distinctly PC game to work... Installed by the store... And the provider is also on the store... But it doesn't auto-install with the game

Ever since you migrated to the Microsoft Auth the login experience is awful (I ranted about that already)

How about you do the bare fucking Minimum of an User experience and Install the fucking dependencies when I re-installed something your fucking store??!!!

The fucking bare minimum that every package manager ever created fucking has as a basic requirement?! Are you kidding me?

Rename your fucking services so they make sense and please don't waste everyone's time by having both shitty logs and no dep management for your own apps... Fucks sake

Red flags in your first week of your software engineering job 🚩

You do the first few days not speaking to anyone.
You can't get into the building and no one turns up until mid day.
The receptionist thinks you're too well dressed to work in this building, thinks you're a spy and calls security on you.
You are eating alone during lunch time in the cafeteria
You have bring your own material for making coffee for yourself

When you try to read the onboarding docs and there aren't any.
You have to write the onboarding docs.

You don't have team mates.
When you ask another team how things are going and they just laugh and cry.😂😭

There's no computer for you, and not even an "it's delayed" excuse. They weren't expecting you.
Your are given a TI PC, because "that's all we have", even though there's no software for it, and it's not quite IBM compatible.
You don't have local admin rights on your computer.💀
You have to buy a laptop yourself to be able to do your job.

It's the end of the week and you still don't have your environment set up and running.
You look at the codebase and there are no automated tests.
You have to request access every time you need to install something through a company tool that looks like it was made in 2001.

Various tasks can only be performed by one single person and they are either out sick or on vacation.
You have to keep track of your time in 6 minute increments, assigned to projects you don't know, by project numbers everyone has memorised (and therefore aren't written down).
You have to fill in timesheets and it takes you 30 minutes each day to fill them in because the system is so clunky.🤮

Your first email is a phishing test from the IT department in another country and timezone, but it has useful information in it, like how to login to the VPN.
Your second email is not a phishing test, but has similar information as the first one. (You ignore it.)
Your name is spelled wrong in every system, in a different way. 2 departments decide that it's too much trouble, and they never fix the spelling as long as you work there. One of them fixes it after you leave, and annoys you for a month because you haven't filled out the customer survey.

The worst boss and human being so far, still wondering how he keeps the company afloat. This was my first longterm developer job almost a decade ago and I was a student at that time. The application was an outlook plug in for a document management system.

Scene 1:
Boss: The processing is too slow. Make it faster.
Me: After analysis and profiling I can prove that the core (developed in VB6 by a physicist and autoconverted to VB.NET) is the bottleneck.
Boss: I don't care. Make it faster and don't touch the core.

Scene 2:
Boss: I want the app to behave in that way.
Me: This is not what we specified previously. Look here. Nonetheless, I would have to rewrite half of the plugin. Mind that it is an outlook plug in and we are restricted by outlook. If you want that, it would take XX days and we do not have enough time until release.
Boss: I don't care. Do it. And the deadline stays as it is.
Boss 2 weeks later: I don't like it.

Scene 3:
Me: To release in time I need more resources. I need at least one tester and another developer would be a huge plus. Also, I need a second PC for testing.
Boss: No.
2 weeks later:
Boss: why does it not work properly in outlook 2010? Didn't you test it?
Me: I could not. I have only outlook 2007. I asked for more resources and did not get them.
Boss: it's your fault. Bad work.

Scene 4:
*Me having failed multiple exams, stress at work, started to drink*
Boss: Don't you like working here?
Me: ...

Finale:
*Me getting written sick with severe depression*
Boss: fires me.
Me: Loses flat. Quits uni. Unemployed for 6 Months, one rejection after another (boss was phoned, that's sure). Moving back to parents. Sues boss. Gets money.

I still hate him and wish him the most painful experiences in life. Such people belong behind bars. But the justice isn't always served. One has to move forward and improve himself.

I just signed up to get this off my chest.
Dear Windows, you god damn moronic, ugly, unuseable abomination of an excuse for an OS. I wonder how we could end up here in this situation. You suck, in every way imaginable. I didnt choose Linux or Mac, you made me do it.
I know no other OS that can screw you up this bad when setting up. My friend is an experienced windows user and the last install took him 2 days. I just spend the last day trying to get this uncompatible sucker installed. I manage to set up an hackintosh quicker than I was able to install Windows the last three times I checked, you scumbag.
Your error messages suck ass, there is nothing I cant figure out given enough time, except your useless hints and pathetic attemps to get anything done on your own.
And you are fucking slow. Just why, do you keep installing stuff I didnt ask you to. Now I got this ugly ass Bing-Toolbar because I missed a damn checkbox in an .exe, which could have also been an exploit, you never know.
You are cluttered with useless stuff. I dont care about you lame ass app store, idc about your cortana annoying spy assistant and I certainly dont care about your forced updates.
Just sit back and feel your PC getting slower every day by background processes. Watch your productivity decline while dealing with their brain dead privilege and file system.
You ugly malformed mutation of software. When I look at your UI I feel disgust while wondering how you can fail with the most basic principles of UX.
How pathetic, badly supported, bug ridden and dangerously unsecure can an OS be you ask while trying to navigate through the settings, a pile of legacy software debt this garbage pile was build on. And your shell... what a sick joke.
I hate you Windows. For screwing other OS with your asshole boot manager, hardware driver requirements and making people send me .zip and .docx. You should be embarrassed to charge money for this unfunctional junk, but you do, a lot.
I really try to see the positive here. You got all the software, but thats not on you, thats because all those poor suckers are trapped with you and the effort to change is too big.
This OS is the most disappointing thing technology could come up with today. I would rather set myself on fire than work with this pain in the ass software professionally. I mean if you are a serious developer at some point you have to admit that you just cant develop on windows. You will get fucked 5 times as often as any Mac or Linux user. Fuck you, Windows.
Hey Microsoft, thanks for Typescript and VSCode and all the other good things you have done. But burn in hell for what you have done to all of us with this piece of shit OS.

Years ago I used to work a guvmant site. They had really strict security rules for internet and how you spent your time. Makes sense considering what that site did. I was a support engineer for some of their process control equipment.

I was approached by an operator supervisor to install dvd player software on a business machine (non process related). Basically just a general purpose PC with no function other than time cards and general office use. I was fine with the request, but the reason was for watching movies during a holiday period by the operators. Not for anything official. So I made some noise about my dislike of this request feigning moral superiority. But the supervisor swore up and down it was for "training" dvds.

So I wrote a simple windows script. The script basically popped up a window that said:
"Security has detected unauthorized media inserted into this machine. Please state the reason for this infraction." It provided a dialog to enter a justification. After you entered the justification it said: "Security has been contacted and your user logged. You will be contacted shortly."

This script was then attached to the supervisors Start folder so it ran when he, and only he logged in. We made sure the "training" video (some movie) was already inserted at this point.

He logged in. He just about shit his pants when reading this. He promptly logged and left the building to walk somewhere else in the site. We called him and let him know it was a gag. His response: That son of a bitch Demolishun!

TL;DR: My devices all hate me and I needed to fix them all.

My Devices really love me.

I rooted my smartphone (LG G5) just yesterday. Everything went fine. Installed TWRP, SuperSU and some nice Apps that utilize root.

Today I was on the go (at CeBIT) and already had the Xposed Installer App on my phone, but didn't attempt installing it yet because I needed my phone for Maps and Messaging and the app had given clear warning about the bricking-potential.

So to the end of the day I get bored, send my last important Messages, installed the Xposed Framework...
... aaaand got stuck in a boot loop.

So I got on my way back home (thanks God I remembered all the trains I needed to take). On the way I had a lot of fun in the Recovery-Terminal and figured that I should be able to fix my phone with no problem at home because the installer made backups (unlike myself).

Coming back home and my pc was still running (should've shut down after installing updates).
The pc behaved odd and I couldn't shut it down properly, which led to cutting the power.
And upon booting my pc I got a ... give it a guess ...
...a bootloop (technically the animation just never ended).

So after I fixed my phone with my spare laptop (just transferred and executed the uninstaller for xposed) I fixed my PC too, which had an old broken dkms-driver.

The odd thing about this is, that this isn't technically a rant. I guess you can confirm that you can't find any swear words.
Because I ENJOYED fixing the devices. I already fixed my pc a couple of times was well as unbricking my rooted phones, so there was fairly little research involved.
I guess I'm now offically twisted.

Now, after my smartphone backups are transferred, I'Ll take my device apart and replace the camera glass which arrived today (and hope, no pray, that my sim card does still work after that)...
... after I blatendly copied a meme to get more attention. 😉

>Gets a new CPU for desktop (yay, went from R5 1600 to R5 3600X)
>Spends half a day flashing new MB BIOS (Needed to flash individual major versions in order, couldn't just go 1.10 to 6.40)
>Finally finishes preparations and goes to replace the CPU
>Cleans the old one and packages it to give it to a friend
>Has issues inserting the new one as the orientation arrow on the motherboard was very hard to make out
>Spends 30 minutes applying thermal paste, worrying about optimal spread
>Forgets which side the CPU fan goes on
>Finally boots back up... CPU fan is suddenly loud AF under load, but eh, temps under stress are sub-60, so, good

~~Next day~~
>Loud CPU fan is too annoying, opens the case again
>CPU fan is on backwards
Ugh
>Takes the fan off, turns it around and fastens again, puts PC back together and boots
>Is quiet again, nice
>Goes to work on the PC
>2 hours later randomly checks temps because no fan noise is weird
>CPU at 75dC, crap
>Opens the (live) PC, CPU fan is not spinning
>Has put the header on one pin to a side
>Unplugs and replugs it correctly
>Fan suddenly starts spinning very fast and cuts my finger
>Finally closes the case once more. All issues resolved

...Its situations like these that make me wonder... What would happen it I had to work with servers in person, physically lol

Shootout to my 2.5GB Maxtor hard drive, that I heavily used between 1997 and 2001. There were no USB drives, and CD burners were too expensive for consumers. So I used to open my PC case, remove the drive (along with Windows and my software), bring it around at my friend's house and have fun while copying hundreds of mp3s, patiently downloaded from filesharing and 56k modems or ripped from CD audio, in and out.

One time it fell out from my desk, hitting hard floor big time. I thought I lost it forever, and basically my whole PC in it. Then I tried plugging again its IDE and power connectors, and it was still working! ... well, half of it. That badass still continued to work with one of its two platters crashed, and got some more mp3s with it.
Maybe I still have it...

!dev

A child's mind is fascinating.

I remember how it felt being a kid, just deliriously happy.

Things were magical, mystical and happy.

I knew the world wasn't perfect, I knew bad things happened to good people.

But a kid's mind is so powerful that it can fill in the blanks with the most cheerful and optimistic perspectives.

And at some point in my childhood I was exposed to videogames, and that kinda took me down fantasy lane even further.

I was extremely young and barely retaining any memories when I was exposed to my first console, a famicom.

I have a somewhat vivid memory of my mind being blown away for the first time by watching my brother play New Ghostbusters II for NES.

From then on, we never stopped and played several console and dos/pc games.

When I was 10, someone from the neighborhood brought in a couple of floppys with Pokemon Yellow.

"What? Pokemon? How the fuck is that even possible? This is a pc, not a gameboy".

I didn't know at the time what an emulator was, but I was super fucking stoked to be able to play that.

My dad had a 1 gb laptop from work that he didn't use, so I hoarded that shit, and I would get to bed and play nearly everyday.

The experience was surreal. I was doing pc gaming... not on a chair, on a fucking bed, and I was playing a gameboy game... on a pc.

It was so intense to me, that even after more than 2 decades of that time in my life, I still remember how it feels like.

Like, you know how you can "feel" things if you think about them? like for example if you think about the taste of chicken, you can somehow feel it for a second.

Well I have like an actual physical sensation linked to that experience but I can't explain it at all, because it's just a sensation.

I think people usually say they feel that way, for example, about the PSX (usually refered to as ps one) loading screen. I experienced that too but when I was 12, so it was not as intense (it does make me feel the fuzzies though).

I also remember other things with very high detail, like the texture of my bed cover, the weather, mom cooking, the clunky shape of the laptop, the way I carelessly stored it above a pile of magazines, etc.

I rememeber ofc how it felt looking at the game sprites, interacting with NPCs, and the goddamn fucking glorious music.

It was dreamy.

Years and years later, I grew up and I stopped living in fantasy world and became more aware of the grim aspects of life my younger self was sugarcoating.

So I tried to play pokemon again, again and again, and no matter how hard I tried to revive that euphoria, I could not never do it.

I started to get annoyed at the game.

"Come oooon, I did the tutorial already, let me skip this.
This pokemon is useless, why am I even training it.
Fuck, I'm tired of grinding"

At some point I accepted that the feeling would never return, and that it would just live in my memory.

Ironically, I can recall that memory and how it felt anytime I want to.

And I can actually still feel it, and throughtout these years, it has never wore down.

And eventually I learned how to play pokemon and enjoy it:

I read tier lists at smogon online and just catch and train the pokemons that are higher on the list, which is how i got to beat yellow in like 3 days.

(This is nothing compared to what speedrunners do, but much better than the weeks it had taken me in the past).

That served as an important lesson that when a kid plays a game, his mind is also the game at the same time, filling the blanks with its imagination.

A very similar experience happened to me with harvest moon, which is the precursor of stardew valley.

and that game is faaar more emotional: you talk to people, overtime you befriend them and they open up, you meet a girl, you marry her, have a kid

you get farm animals, you brush them, they become happy

you get attached

that game was also so powerful in me that in all naiveness I thought I wanted to be a farmer.

Eventually I grew up and hit puberty and from then on, I focused more on competitive games, like smash bros, cs and tf2.

and i dunno how to end a post so eat my fucking nuts

Rant

So a couple months ago, my dad called me to try and solve a problem he was having in his work.
You see, my dad owns a driving school and he was teaching 14 and 15yo kids how to ride mopeds and their theory exams are made in the school's facility, by going to this website of the entity that rules the moped teaching thing. When the time to have the exams came, they couldn't even see the exams and one of the kids had one of his attempts wasted (they had 3 attempts). We mailed and called the entity multiple times, to no avail, as they told us to "check the website, the instructions are all there". They were also trying to get it together but they couldn't. Here's the "funny" part: the software in which the exams were done ran on XP and there was no way in hell we could make it work on our W10 PCs. Not to mention this is a natiowide problem.
We reinstalled Java to v.7.9 (I think...?) as the "instructions" told us, with no results whatsoever.
So my dad decided to call me and asked me to bring a PC that didn't run W10. The closest thing to XP I could think of was my uncle's Toshiba, that had Vista, so I went to his house and grabbed it and drove to my dad's school. Even in compatibility mode, it didn't work. Everyone was in despair LoL. I was even put on the phone with the entity's technician, who didn't know how to solve it either but was trying, as well with our tech guy.
After a bit of running around and crying inside, our secretary remembered we still had a tower on site that ran XP. We went for the thing and connected it and booted it up. After reinstalling Java and setting security to "medium" (required), and meddling with zoom (the window was too small to show the whole exam and if the window showed up before we set the zoom to 75% or so we couldn't choose the answers) it was finally set to do the exams.
I've never felt so relieved for solving tech stuff LoL. It took me 3h to get it done and I feel it would have been easier if we had remembered about the tower earlier but oh well what can one do.

So I started a 80hour intership today at our Department of Education and this is how it went...

Boss : Design a database to show all applicants that applied for jobs at schools.

*I start thinking which tables and columns I'm going to use and start designing the database, writes out all the tables on paper*

Me : Is there a pc I should work on or should I use my laptop? And which database engine do you use?

B : No you can use your laptop. And btw we use MS Access

*Thinking wtf kind of business even governmental uses Access for their databases. But anyway, start creating the databases and relationships when my boss walks in*

B : No, what are you doing?

M : Im creating the database you asked for.

B : No, you design it on paper. Draw all the tables, draw the report and the form then you come show it to me, if I decide its good enough you can come in tomorrow and start creating it.

*Wtf kind of place is this, are you mentally retarded? You have a IT staff of 3 people, in which only the actual fulltime intern is a qualified IT professional, but when me or him tries to do some actual work, you give us shit about doing what was asked from us*

It is time... to rant about macs!

No, seriously - I had such a different experience about which not many talk in real life or pretend that it never happens....

Model: 2015 mid MBP 15" with second to highest specs (don't have dedicated gpu).

Rattling fucking toy.... Yea, it rattles! If you shake/move ir sit in trait/bus - it non-stop rattles as a fucking toy. Worst part? It's confirmed issue by apple and it manifacturing issue that they are not keen on fixing!!!! WTF? We have 4 macs in our office - all of them fucking rattles... God help me how annoying that is. (Lose LCD control panel that unsticks from glue. Replacing it solves the issue for 1 month if you carry it anywhere).

Constant fucking crashing/updates.... Every morning I wake up and don't have an app that requires confirmation for restart - it's restarted. YAY, turning on all apps once again.... Why you may ask? Well, because if you tinker with software in any way - it fails to update it and hell breaks lose. It's been a long time since High-Sierra came around and the issue is still there (not running Mojave as it conflicts with soft I have... Woo!). Tried few times - updates fail. Resolution? Reinstall OS!

OS conflicts with applications - damn... People told me it works out of the box.... Yeah, as long as you don't upgrade the OS - then it breaks. Why? Well, because.

Piece of shit power supply. With 4 of our office power supplies - 2 of them failed twice withing warranty and once afterwards... Really? Not to mention that all 4 are starting to shear the sleeve or already did (mine is just wrapped with white electrical tape to give it a support... lol).

Bluetooth - who the hell needs that in mac, right? Well, people do. To start with - it conflicts with 2.4GHz wireless network - you might have one of those and not both at the same time. Next thing is using a device that needs constant connection (mouse, headphones, keyboard - non apple branded) - shit... They can't stay connected for more than an hour without any issues... Constant battle to re-connect it, to re-pair the device and all due to smart apple bluetooth settings. Hell, my mouse (logitech MX master) was even printing random symbols in some applications if moved. All of the issues went away after using a bluetooth dongle... WOO!!!!

Xcode... Ahh, you may never prepare your mac if you don't download 17GB of fucking xCode libraries that enables some tools to be installed/runned as you can NOT get them in any other way and you have to install full xCode software in order to get them... YAY! 17GB wasted on my 256GB SSD that I can't upgrade. GREAT!

OsX applications - ah, don't get offended but if you are using them and you are fine with them - you are probably a monkey that loves being told what to do. You can't customise any actions, you can't configure it the way you like - either you accept their default workflow or go kill yourself. Yep... Had issues with calendar, mail, iMessages, safari... None of them fit my needs :)

Resolution scaling... Fucking hell, the display is 2880 x 1800 but all you let me to use is 1440x900 without scaling? Am I blind to you? Scaling the resolution means that you are fucked if some applications don't support scaling very well. Looking at you Jetbrains - your IDES suck at scaling and slows down the pc to a potato....

Now the pros - keyboard is way better than the new ones, trackpad is GREAT - no need for mouse (using it on external 4k displays only), the battery life is great - getting around 6h of continues development time, 8 if using sublime instead of phpStorm and well, that's about it...

To clarify:
I've bought this device due to the fact that at that time mac and windows pc's with similiar specs costed the same while windows pc sucked with their quality of the device and trackpad... Now the situation is better and when time comes for a next upgrade - it's going to be one of these:
Razer Blade 15, Dell XPS 15, Lenovo Carbon X1 series.
And of course - LINUX. I've had enough issues with windows, and had enough of retardness of apple ecosystem, so switching it is a must for me.

Disclaimer: I might be an unhappy customer, a bit picky but I'd like my device to be setted up as I like and continue to have that until I don't like, not until the company decides to break it. Not to mention that paying almost a yearly salary in my country for one device - I'd expect it to be at least reliable and work without issues....

Rant over.

ps. You can disagree with me, this is my personal experience with MBP over the last 3 years :)

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

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

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

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

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

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

Parents had asked me to assemble some furniture, fix the pc and so some other "brain" work

Furniture
Me: *Stops to check something in the manual*
Parents: Are you stuck? Maybe try assembling the door upside down
Me: No, it is the right way
Parents: *Ramble, ramble*
Me: Just let me work, shut the hell up

PC
Me: *Checks cables, checks logs, ect*
Parents: Maybe it is the problem with (insert random tech word there)?
Me: No.
Parents: W h y?
Me: Let me finish, it isnt that, (tech word) isnt even correlated to that
Parents: But, but, you never talk to me... (ramble ramble)
Me: Get the hell outta the room
*Argumemt breaks out*
30min later

Me: *Finnaly manages to fix it after the heated argument*
Me: I finished, everything works
Parents: Great, but you are mean
Me: I managed to finish the work in 15 min, you dont even have enough strengh to call for a specialist, (but knowing me i wouldnt allow it anyway because a lot of them make a poor job), so in order to make it properly and to relieve you from learning how to fucking google i want you to stay out of this so i can just finish my job. Your interruptions waste time and i dont need your help at all. Everytime you tried to fix stuff you always managed to fuck shit up when you tried to do anything.
Parents: (ramble)
Me: SHUT THE FUCK UP, LEAVE MY ROOM
Parents:
Me:
Parents: *Leave the room*

1h later i get 25$ for the job perfectly done

Sometime i wish they were tech independent, so i can save my sanity and time but money is nice.

If anybody tries to argue that i should respect them:
I tried talking to them nicely countless times through years, but they always force themself to a project and they always fuck shit up because of it. I tried telling them about my problems and they tried helping me but after it didnt work they retured to the old: "it is the pc fault" and similar. Even if they couldnt help me i juat wanted them to understand my situation, but no that didnt happened.

First i fix my life then i will fix the relationship

But but greeeeeg, relationships should be cared for always!
Eat shit. There is time for family and there is time for me especialy when my life can suddenly colapse due to my problems.

!rant !notrant !confession_maybe? Bit of a read.

Last year, around September (around 8 months into my first job in the industry), I started loosing motivation to be a developer. By then I had consistently dropped out of 3 or 4 courses for my degree (no penalties as it was pretty much within the starting weeks of the each course). I was think that I do not want to do this. It got so bad that I was looking for other jobs and even trade apprenticeships (I am old-ish so chances of that are so bloody low).
I had my mind set. Including not wanting to finish the degree I had started, which only had 1 year as full time to complete.

My missus supported me in my decision making, but she insisted that I finish the degree as the years I spent on it would have been a waste if I don't. So I agreed, with the idea that I will do this part time when I find another job.

Fast forward to New Years and a very spontaneous decisions was made. I resigned from my dev job and we ended up moving away to another city, two weeks later. By this point on I was so certain that I did not want to be in the IT industry. I had not done any dev work (personal projects or learning new technology etc) outside of the job for months. It had been months since I've visited devrant (to be honest it was not even installed on my phone, mainly because I broke my phone and after having it replaced I had not reinstalled a large portion of the apps I used). I had sold my custom built pc thinking that we do not need two PC's (we kind of don't, she's fine with her laptop) which meant no more dev stuff as none of this stuff was set up on my missus pc. I was looking for all kinds of jobs outside of the IT industry, anything really.

But then something happened. And this is that something. I mean this, deverant. I was flicking through the apps list on google play store, and I saw devrant, and I choose to reinstall it. I began reading rants and comments and I am certain that this made me realise why I want to be a developer. Within about 2 weeks of redownloading deverant I was enrolled full time as a uni student fully motivated to earn my degree.

There are bits and pieces left out of the story. I don't regret leaving my first ever dev job and moving away, it does seem drastic but it changed me for the better I believe. I have the experience from that role and I new fresh start so to speak. I think my missus new this was just a phase, although it felt so certain about it.

I am more of a lurker than a ranter or a commenter on this social platform but I felt that I need to share this. Thanks for reading this. Not really sure what to tag this. Has anyone else experienced this before?

Im forced to work with c++ on windows for a course.

0) c++ is fucking unusable without a central repo for managing dependencies. Maybe im just too used to maven but you shouldnt be downloading dll files in 2018.

1) visual studio can go suck a fat one. I got a fairly fast pc and it takes fucking forever to load anything. For comparison, eclipse with all my plugins (and i have a lot) loads in ~10 seconds, vs2017 does in 35.

2) why the fuck is there no cross platform compilation for c++? Its supposed to run on everything right? Whats so hard about porting a fucking linux compiler so i dont realixe i have .exe files when i want to work with my laptop on the bus?

3) c++17 (? Or whatevers the newest) syntax is like a deep barf on a hot summer day after eating a whole watermelon. Its fucking unreadable and autopointers simply dont work. And its not even my lack of skill this time, its the code that the other members used and it worked for half of them.

After doing a regular CV update, I realised I started coding more than a quarter of a century ago... I then remembered the first command the succeedded on my first PC.

format C:

There was a book that expained how to format a floppy disk (format A:) but it didn't work. At that time I had no idea what floppy is but I knew that C: works, so I thought I'd give it a try...

Oh, was there laughter in the repair shop :)

Feeling pretty accomplished for someone who did no "work" today lol. I needed to work on side gigs but instead I:

1) Factory reset a 2011 Macbook Pro I'm selling and reinstalled Mojave using a patch (this laptop is officially unsupported by Mojave as of June).

2) Migrated all personal files from my windows desktop to my NAS. I'm turning this computer into a gaming rig now that I exclusively use my 2017 Macbook Pro for development.

3) Setup RDP from my macbook to my desktop.

4) Fixed registry errors and deleted junk apps off my desktop.

5) Erased and formatted all USB drives I had lying around.

6) Packaged up an old Xbox One for my brother-in-law which will get mailed tomorrow (included a few USBs for him since I rarely use'em).

7) Tested streaming my Xbox One X from my PC but it's laggy as F (both are wired, have static internal IPs, and use my router for DNS...it's just the app I guess).

8) Scored a like-new Scuf Vantage for my PS4 for $140 (the guy who was selling it paid $214 a month ago lol). I traded my spare Xbox One S for a PS4 slim and in an attempt to get used to it, I got this controller with thumbsticks in the same position as Xbox's.

9) Fixed and updated my Synergy app (mouse/keyboard sharing - I can use PBP on my 38" LG ultrawide and it's fairly seamless going between them).

10) Cloned a buddy's repo and set the project up to work locally.

11) Starting to get some work done while watching the Vikings game.

(I'll give some context before the rant: I'm part if the IT department of a manufacturing company (actually I'm 1/2 of the department), and all the applications (old an new - except the ones used on production line) used in the company are my responsibility, that including most of databases too... Also, English isn't my native language so there will be some words or phrases that I'll probably write wrong... Sorry for that, if there are any corrections, I'll be glad to hear them)

So...

There will be an implementation of new "control point" on the "shipping department" which consists on a electromechanical equipment controlled by a PLC. And despite the original concept was a collaboration between 2 departments (we, IT, and Production Control), I was never taken in consideration about anything of the project... To be fair, I forget about its existence until two weeks ago.

So, a few days I learned that there are a huge delay regarding the original deadline (mainly because the supplier was delayed with the delivery of their system), and since two weeks (less, actually, because some holydays in between) I'm learning how to integrate that "P.o.S" into an existing application on a PC using a serial communication (not the main problem, as I've done that before... With another brand of PLC's) while avoiding buying any additional software (to get the communication done and in a easy way) and that sort of things... But discovering in the process that it will be necessary to acquire such additional SW in order to finish the job ASAP.

When suddenly I get the "news" that it's almost all my duty (and responsibility) to meet the original deadline, because it doesn't matter how the other departments screw all the schedule, it's the job of IT to get the shit done in time... And what is worst: they didn't said that in such straight manner, no, the implied it while making a quick test with the general manager.

I mean, WTF? Besides doing a "respectable" number of "user support" activities in a dialy basis, I also need to manage the activities of other departments? And also fix their screw ups on a schedule that I just learned days before?

And also there is a coworker (one of whom screwed up) that, almost every time she see me, is asking "how much until you'll finish?"

As I read on a meme years ago: "please, give patience, because if you give strength, I'll need bail money too..."

Damn... I don't know of the benefits of this work are worth all this nonsense

I do not usually shit on operating systems or participate on hate discussions about tech and what not.

But boy, Windows 11 does fucking suck and it is giving me Vista vibes regarding how much I fucking hate it. And no, unfortunately I cannot change this PC to Linux (as I have before with other work computers) since I need Windows for it.

Project Manager: I want you to work faster and make the performance faster. No excuses

Specs: potato pc

So, these guys came to me at work, asking if I knew how the "Low Orbit Scanner" worked...
I said: "no, what's that?"
They said: "It's that tool used for DDoS attacks"
So I replied: "Oh you mean Low Orbit Ion Cannon"
them: "yea that, you know how it works?"
me: "ye, but what do you want to use it for?"
them: "just want to learn how it works"
me: "you download it, run it then fill out the things?"
them: "but I tried it and it doesn't take out the server I tried"
me: "Means your PC is to much of a filthy casual, buy a new one"
them: "can't you help us getting it more effective"
me: "yes, but I rather not end up in jail... I have a job and a clean document..."

The looks of their faces, love to see that disappointment of my colleagues when I say (or atleast hint): "go figure it out yourself"

NewLifeNewHope update No.2 / Day 5

My Server Is finally opened and i installed 2x8 TB WDC Harddrives and SATA 128 SSD. I know this server is freaking garbage, but i got this PC for free, and have somewhat good-ish upgrade path, so heres the spec :
-Gigabyte H110m-S2 LGA1151
-Intel i3-6300
-8GB DDR4 single channel RAM
-128 GB SSD
-2x8TB Harddrives
-TP-Link 1000mbps NIC

so the plan is to make this server as the Main Repository -- yes no offsite backup plan for now -- and also i want to make this server as an Email Server and for hosting my company's website. I've already asked for static IP from my ISP and will take effect tommorow.

I need help for choosing the Operating System (i like centOS) for my server. and to setting this Server to work like what i planned but i don't know where to start, Any help and/or References will be great !

On one side I fucking hate waiting for the internet technician. I would've liked to go to work (especially as there is an event right now) and not sit here during "That-5-hour-window-because-scheduling-isn't-a-thing-the-german-Telekom-will-tell-you-about" and nurse my impatience.
On the other side, I have idle time and I like programming when everything's quiet in the house and only the heating and my PC cooling system are whirring quietly, so I've got that going for me which is nice.
Only too bad there's no internet right now.

Windows 10 updates. I see many posts about singular events that people have experienced, so I thought I'd try to sum up all the problems I have had.

Home computer, always on:
Is scheduled to update during 'inactive hours' but the options for that window are too narrow. So almost daily the 'required updates' overlay pops up WHILE I'M DOING STUFF and I have to say 'Ok' then close the update settings window that opens automatically so I can get on with what I'm doing.
Now, if I'm just browsing, writing or something like that, it's just really annoying.
But when I'm gaming and it causes the game to freeze up (because, you know, ubisoft and ea and such) and I lose my progress, that pisses me off.
When I'm hosting movie night with my friends and the movie gets interrupted, that pisses me off.
Even when I'm just trying to relax with a good show after a hard day and THAT gets interrupted, it really bugs me.
And then when there's a major update and I don't want to schedule it right away, they decide that I probably meant 'do it in an hour'. And then a message pops up every hour with only the option to postpone one more hour. What happened to all the options for scheduling it for several days in the future? Nope! Can't decide? We'll do it RIGHT NOW, NO TAKEBACKS, THAT'S FINAL!
I cannot fathom that they can't find a way to ACTUALLY do the 'inactive hours' thing.

And then there's the work computer. For the last two years, that has been a laptop that I shut down and take home every day. The common problem with that is that it always tells me it has to update when I want to shut down for the day because I have to go home. I can't leave the pc turned on in my bag, it would overheat. So since there is no option to shut down without updating anymore, I have had to rely on the fact that using the power button to shut down circumvents the update.
And if I don't remember to update at home, it's then going to waste my time the next morning at work.
Just give me the option to delay for a bit, then remind me NON-INTRUSIVELY so I can do it when I have the time.
And then there was the update that prevented the machine from booting and I had to waste TWO working days reinstalling EVERYTHING! And we were about 6-7 people hit by that update in our organization.

So yeah. Windows updates are a real fucking problem. Yes, I wan't critical fixes for security problems and other serious software flaws.
But the current policy of 'fuck you, we're doing this' is just not fucking acceptable in any way.

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.

I have a question for all you Linux pros:

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

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

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

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

It is the time for the proper long personal rant.

Im a fresh student, i started few months ago and the life is going as predicted: badly or even worse...
Before the university i had similar problems but i had them under control (i was able to cope with them and with some dose of "luck" i graduated from high school and managed to get into uni). I thought by leaving the town and starting over i would change myself and give myself a boost to keep going. But things turned out as expected. Currently i waste time everyday playing pc games or if im too stressed to play, i watch yt videos. Few years ago i thought i was addicted, im not. It might be a effect of something greater. I have plans, for countess inventions, projects, personal, for university and others and ALL of them are frozen, stopped, non existant. No motivation. I had few moments when i was motivated but it was short, hours or only minutes. Long term goals dont give me any motivation. They give as much short lived joy, happines as goals in games and other things... (no substance abuse problems, dont worry). I just dont see point of my projects anymore. Im sure that my projects are the only thing that will give me experience and teach me something but... i passed the magic barrier of univercity, all my projects are becoming less and less impressive... TV and other sources show people, briliant people, students, even children that were more succesful than me

if they are better than me why do i even bother? companies care more for them, especialy the prestigious ones, they have all the fame, money, funding, help, gear without question!
of course they hardworked for ther positions, they could had better beggining or worse but only hard work matters right?

As i said. None of my work matters, i worked hard for my whole life, studing, crafting, understanding: programming, multiple launguages, enviorements, proper and most effcient algorithms, electronic circuits, mechanical contraptions. I have knowlege about nearly every machine and i would be able to create nearly everything with just access to those tools and few days worth of practice. (im sort of omnibus, know everything) But because had lived in a small town i didnt have any chances of getting the right equpment. All of my electronical projects are crap. Mechanical projects are made out of scrap. Even when i was in high school, nobody was impressed or if they were they couldnt help me.
Now im at university. My projects are stagnant, mostly because of my mental problems. Even my lifestyle took a big hit. I neglect a lot of things i shouldnt. Of course greg, you should go out with friends! You cant dedicate 100% of your life to science!
I fucking tried. All of them are busy or there are other things that prevent that... So no friends for me. I even tried doing something togheter! Nope, same reasons or in most cases they dont even do anything...
Science clubs? Mostly formal, nobody has time, tools are limited unless you designed you thing before... (i want to learn!, i dont have time to design!), and in addition to that i have to make a recrutment project... => lack of motivation to do shit.

The biggest obstacle is money. Parts require money, you can make your parts but tools are money too. I have enough to live in decent apartment and cook decently as well but not enough to buy shit for projects. (some of them require a lot or knowlege... and nobody is willing to give me the second thing). Ok i found a decent job oppurtunity. C# corporation, very nice location, perfect for me because i have a lot of time, not only i can practice but i can earn for stuff. I have a CV or resume just waiting for my friend to give me the email (long story, we have been to that corp because they had open days and only he has the email to the guy, just a easier way)
But there are issiues with it as well so it is not that easy.

If nobody have noticed im dedicated to the science. Basicly 100% scientist that want to make a world a better place.

I messaged a uni specialist so i hope he will be able to help me.
For long time i have thought that i was normal, parent were neglecting my mental health and i had some situations that didnt have good infuence on me as well. I might have some issiues with my brain as well, 96% of aspargers symptoms match, with other links included. I dont want to say i have it but it is a exciuse for a test. In addition to that i cant CANT stop thinking, i even tried not thinking for few minutes, nope i had to think about something everytime. On top of that my biological timer is flipped. I go to sleep at 5 am and wake up at 5pm (when i dont have lectures).
I prefer working at night, at that time my brain at least works normaly but i dont want to disrupt roommates...
And at the day my brain starts the usual, depression, lack of motivation, other bullshit thing.

I might add something later, that is all for now.

love helping users that can describe their problem and then we have the "other" side of users, the life sucking golems of collective stupidity.

You get "software does not work!" and asks for error message or description of what doesn't work and get same response "it does not work".

After a few rounds in the "what is wrong support circle" it ends with user has changed PC to one were the software is not installed...

"it does not work" no effing shit sherlock you want me to install some IQ with it?

Today I fucked Up by making friend install Linux when he doesn't even know what OS is.

Friend's Windows 7 broke. Unbootable & unfixable. I told him to reinstall. He has no idea how so he told me he will rent a PC (apparently that's a thing) until he buys a new one (he wanted it anyways). I told him it's bullshit to rent for PC when yours is totally ok only without OS.

He agreed and that's where I fucked Up. I told him how to make bootable flash disks(it was pain to get some info from him tho..) and he said he downloaded cracked Win7.. I told him it's suicide to use cracked OS for MANY fucking reasons. He agreed and I told him to install Ubuntu.... I thought it's easy that even my grandma could use it...... Well, apparently I was, in technical terms, "FUCKING WRONG"(all caps cuz tech terms).

He wasn't even able to Google how to install Steam on Ubuntu(apt install steam?) ... Constantly asking me "well and what should i write to Google?" And other shit..

I Always woke up to messages From him like "This shit doesn't work I'mma uninstall it" and I Always responed in one command or first Google result and it suddenly started to work.

After 2 days he gave up and is using cracked Win7. Can't wait for his reaction when I pwn him on nearest LAN party 😂 Maybe he will reconsider using cracked OS.

Anyway I learn from my Mistake. Just fuck me...

So this will be my first rant/story sorry if it gets too long.

So finished work and I was like finally some days off, went to bed, woke up the next morning, went to near city to take care of some work, went back and I noticed they were digging the ground near my place, as I've found out from neighbors they were changing some pipes, well ok no problem arrived home, sat on my PC to study a bit and do a bit gaming, but guess what?? NO INTERNET well ok contacted the ISP, the idiots told me it will take them 2 days to arrive WTF? is this 2018 or 1918?? I was so pissed off but ok the next day they called me that they arrived, they checked and said that they will need to fix some wires they will return the same day.. so I've waited few hours but no internet, the asholes didn't came, so the next day they arrived and guess what?! the idiots that digged the holes cut the wires, instead of fucking contacting the ISP to ask for supervisor to tell them where they can dig they didn't know what was the fire for and they thought oh well lets cut the fucking wire, and instead of stopping and contacting the ISP about their mistake they continued with the digging and cut the wire at 3 places, so the ISP at the end called the police, the plumbers that did the digging where just laughing, why do you laugh you primitive ashole, even 10 year old would first ask if it can continue if it finds something that he didn't know about it (I call primitive the person not the job title), and the best part is that the idiots not only they cut the wire at 3 places they also took part of it out of the ground and then they filled the holes back! Now I won't have internet for 2 fucking weeks, yes in 2018 this is happening, at that moment I was so pissed, but kept my cool and contacted the ISP to give me LTE USB stick to use it for the next 2 weeks, sadly they couldn't do that wtf??? So I asked politely who will pay the damage for me not working for 2 weeks and they said that they will gladly pay the damage.. So I was confused because that literally meant that they will compassed me for the 2 weeks, so I re-asked are they sure about that and they said yes, so lets see what it will be done, in the meantime I solved the internet problem by using my phone to access internet on the PC.. But still its amazing how primitive people can be and how ISP don't have alternative solutions for such cases, just to point out this sam ISP bragged how they will be among the first to bring 5G when it arrives... LOL

How to deal with situations when in work people are overstepping personal boundaries too much?

My situation is that 2 months ago I started working in a very small startup and it currently consist of 3 ceos(main ceo, marketing ceo, product manager) and 3 employees (backend, android and ios).

What I currently dread is tea breaks. There is one at monday before work which lasts for 1 hour. And there is another one at Friday after lunch which lasts 1 hour again. I hate these Friday talks about "what are your plans for the weekend" which then triggers a circlejerk of ppl trying to impress each other about what they are going to do on their weekends. Same happens on mondays they circlejerk about how their weekend was amazing.

My situation is that I came to this country just to get skills and make shit ton of money when Im at it. Besides my fulltime work, I also am freelancing part time in my previous gig and also Im managing 2 other hobbie projects. I like to keep myself occupied during weekends so they usually consist of shopping/pc repairs/gym/working on my hobbie projects.

So basically when I tell them what I've done over the weekend the ceo's don't seem to be impressed so they start suggesting me to do something else. I completely loose any motivation of sharing my personal life when they start telling me what to do with my life.

I don't feel like exploring the city or meeting new people since maximum Im going to stay in this country is 6-9 more months. Then I'm probably going back to my own country.

Anyways even overall, I started dreading this companies culture. The politeness is so fake. For example there is an employee which has worked 3 years for them and the ceos haven't even increased his salary. I joined 2 months ago and I get paid more than him! They dont value loyalty at all since immigrants can be replaced easily. Another example: 2 weeks ago it was my birthday and no one from ceos even shook my hand, for them it was normal to just say happy bd during a standup.

So fking weird. I feel like I'm seeing redflags every day and not sure how long more I can stay here.

I decided to tweak my two years old-mild overclocking on my main/home pc, to get more juice out of it.

Started with small steps running benchmarks each time I upped the clock.
Didnt crash me once up until it crashed while windows was booting after restart.
I thought to myself, that's normal, now I just have to lower it a bit until I find the sweet spot.

After windows finished crash dumping, restarted, lowered clock from bios, and headed to boot windows.

Windows recovery came up to scan my installation, pretty normal after a bsod.
I was waiting for it to finish, thinking that ofc there is no error you silly windows, until the recovery said that it could not recognize the error.

Proceeding to boot normal windows via the correspndent button in the recovery, the recovery itself came up again scanning for errors. I waited again only for the same outcome, and restarted my pc.
Yeap the recovery again scanning for errors.

How the hell did my boot became corrupted after just a crash. I've been fighting since yesterday for hours to fix this shitty situation but to no avail. I really dont want to clean install...

I couldnt even sleep well last night thinking that I have to fix this after work today...

Fuck my life, fuck windows

New work place (changed the PC bellow (so now I have just a little more room.
And the stuff that arrived in 10 days.
Only arround 90 packages to arrive, all arduino or eletrónics related...
Must up my credit card limit
... Reached maximum this month.
No I only need that energy I had before the brake down.. Maby forcing me to finish the projects I already have in mind.
After all, I need a cnc to make my projects, so I must make one

tldr: Fuck Adobe Premiere

What the flying fuck.
I have a school project together with a friend and decided to do a video. Not only do we now only have one fucking day left, because the teacher decided we dont need time or anything, but I have to learn video editing software, record clips and create the video withing one fucking day.
I've downloaded Premiere because I have a 7 day trial left and had Creative Cloud on my PC and WHAT THE FUCK kind of fucked up bullshit software is this human compiled piece of shit?! I needed to google how to add text and edit it because adding text gives you absolutely nothing, you get no possibility to edit the text in any way, except the content. After googling for 10 minutes because I have the newest version and they changed the text tool, I found out that you need to go to another tab... of which there is 7 and all have such telling names like: "Effects" and "Compose"...
I needed to go to "Effects" BECAUSE WHY THE FUCK NOT, TEXT SURE LOOKS LIKE AN EFFECT TO ME! Then I wanted to align it to the right so its on 50% of the screen. You fucking cant, I've tried and looked for an hour the only possibility you have is to align it to the center or just throw it somewhere. The snapping didn't even work correctly. So I tried to do something else because I was ready to punch a kitten.
A box. A box thats black. A box thats black and thats aligned to the... FUCK YOU, YOU CANT ALIGN THIS BOX.

I cant align a box...
They dont even give me the possibility to...
But I can align the text BOX, not even the FUCKING TEXT itself...

What
The
Fuck

This is the worst program I've EVER had to use. I'm fucking mad and this fucking project can FUCK ITSELF.

Today I got to work and could not find my computer anymore.

A little background: I am studying IT half of the time, the other half I work at a small software company. Today I came back from three months of University and wanted to start working again.

On the desk I worked the last six months is a laptop. I used a tower. So I asked where my PC went, but literally no one can tell my where it is. Some people think the admin gave it to some other person but saved the HDD somewhere, but he does not answer the phone and he is not in the office for another two days.

TL;DR I am sitting here, writing a rant and drinking coffee. I should have waited some days before showing up...

Well well well.
Story time.

Since we are working from home for the past 4 months, I finally decided to install a Microsoft SQL server on my home server. (Mostly was using Azure)

My server is running Windows Server 2012 R2.
Tried installing SQL 2019 : fail, 2016 : Fail, 2012 : Fail. Some obscure message about some DLLs not being at right version. (And a warning that it is no recommended to install SQL server on domain controller, but I know, it is my home setup, not roduction)

“Ok fine, I’ll install it on my PC instead”. Windows 10 PC. NOPE. “Cannot install on a compressed drive”. Welp, wtf ? (Of course you cannot select destination install folder, I could’ve put it on another drive).

So here I am. Working 100% on Windows, installed Ubuntu server 20 LTS in Hyper-V, Installed Microsoft SQL server on it (BTW, install is very easy compared to windows). And that shit is working. And new “Terminal” app does support SSH out of box, no need to add Putty !

So as a Windows user, I needed Linux to make Microsoft SQL techno work.

Nothing will ever surprise me anymore. (BTW it’s fucking fast. I like SQL server on Linux)

when KhronosGroup anounced Vulkan back then, they also announced a whole set of software, that can handle all the new formats, that they introduced.

One format in particular peaked my interest recently, which is ktx2. It's an image format, that can be multilayered, and supercompressed, has inline mipmapping, and most importantly: streamed directly to the GPU, without involving the CPU basically at all.

Now here comes the kicker. If i want to use this format (mind you: Vulkan is around for a while now) for creating Skyboxes, there is only a single tool, that can properly convert hdr images to ktx2, and it only works on windows. Oh and there are no binaries, so in every case you have to compile it yourself.

Ah and then i thought, okay what if i then already render the cubemap faces and assemble them by hand into the cubemap, because _some_ ktx tools work on linux, then that should work right? wrong. When assembling it, it turns out, that now it's a 2D image instead of a 2DArray image with one element (which apparently is not the same for skyboxes)

Why is this shit such a pain in the ass?

Like.. I'm currently rendering equirectangular hdr images on my linux machine, then move these (usually 100MB) files over to some windows PC, convert it there into ktx2 cubemaps and then move it back. And everytime i need to do a change on the skybox, i have to repeat this whole nonsense. Ah.. and this tool doesn't even properly work on Windows, like you can't just disable mipmaps or change the filtering, because then the skybox is just black for some reason.

The funniest thing is, at the end of the day, these ktx2 files work on linux, as well as windows, mac and even mobile platform, so there's really no reason, that the conversion tool only works on one of them systems.

But hey, at long last i got them working, and this stuff looks quite nice now 👌

At work everybody uses Windows 10. We recently switched from Vagrant to Docker. It's bad enough I have to use Windows, it's even worse to use Docker for Windows. If God forbid, you're ever in this situation and have to choose, pick Vagrant. It's way better than whatever Docker is doing... So upon installing version 2.2.0.0 of Docker for Windows I found myself in the situation where my volumes would randomly unmount themselves and I was going crazy as to why my assets were not loading. I tried 'docker-compose restart' or 'down' and 'up -d', I went into Portainer to check and manually start containers and at some point it works again but it doesn't last long before it breaks. I checked my yml config and asked my colleagues to take a look. They also experience different problems but not like mine. There is nothing wrong with the configuration. I went to check their github page and I saw there were a lot of issues opened on the same subject, I also opened one. Its over a week and I found no solution to this problem. I tried installing an older version but it still didn't work. Also I think it might've bricked my computer as today when I turned on my PC I got greeted by a BSOD right at system start up... I tried startup repair, boot into safe mode, system restore, reset PC, nothing works anymore it just doesn't boots into windows... I had to use a live USB with Linux Mint to grab my work files. I was thinking that my SSD might have reached its EoL as it is kinda old but I didn't find any corrupt files, everything is still there. I can't help but point my finger at Docker since I did nothing with this machine except tinkering with Docker and trying to make it work as it should... When we used Vagrant it also had its problems but none were of this magnitude... And I can't really go back to Vagrant unless my team also does so...

iOS is rotting my soul.

I've been a user of iPhone for 6 years now. For the first couple years, I wasnt really mindful of software I use, or I guess I didnt really care. As long as it did the bare minimum, I.e. bank app, call, text, browse, watch youtube vids, I didnt really care. However, in the last couple years, ive become very interested in tech and have worked on small developer projects, spent a lot of time coding in my free time, found really inspiring software and apps on my regular computer that just blow my mind on how advanced they are, and how I, some dumb guy with internet access, can just download it on my PC and use it.

This led me into a kind of software honeymoon phase, where I created a shiny new Github account and started exploring what other cool tools are just out there, available to me for free. My software honeymoon was spent on the beaches and resorts of the open-source software ecosystem. Exploring the gem-bearing caves and beautiful forests of anything from free open-source OCR programs(I needed it to convert my dads manuscript from scanned PDF .jpeg's to actual UTF8 text) to open-source RGB lighting/keymapping software to escape the memory-and-CPU-hungry(and most likely advertising-ID-interested) proprietary software that comes with the brand of mouse/keyboard/controller/etc.

It was like I was a kid exploring Disneyland for the first time or something. But then... then... I got off my computer. Picked up my phone to check notifications. Ew, tinder is blowing up notification center with marketing shit. I go to settings. Notification settings. Tinder's at the bottom so I just want to use a search bar instead of scrolling. There's no search bar. Minor inconvenience. Dark mode isnt dark enough for me. I guess thats just too damn bad, because for the next two hours, I'll have to figure it out by messing with accessibility settings. Time for bed, and I'm just getting plum tired of having to turn on my alarms every night for work the next morning. So I used the 'Automations' app to do it for me. For the next two weeks, at the time specified, 'There was an error running your automation' until I just delete the automation. Browsing through the FaceID settings, I see 'Attention Aware Features'. Cool, maybe now my phone won't automatically dim the screen when im in the middle of reading notifications on my lock screen. Haha, nope still does it. After turning on my alarms, I go to sleep. I wake up an hour late for work because those handy 'Attention Aware Features' silenced my alarm immediately because I fell asleep watching a youtube video.

I could go on and on. Its actually making me feel depressed typing this on my phone, fighting with Apple's primitive autocorrect and annoying implementation of Swype to type.

When you want to upgrade your shitty work PC, but the CPU cooler says no.

i often do tech support in chat rooms in my free time (because i like spreading good will,) so here's a tech horror story

"""

"hey, can you help me fix something?"

sure?

"so i dug my old XP machine out of my closet and replaced the bad Ethernet card with a different one and when i plug in the ethernet cable the PC bluescreens."

# oboi

did you install the drivers? Sounds like it needs drivers

"no"

then install them

"no"

why not?

"it doesn't need any"

why do you say that?

"it said \"This device is set up and ready to use.\" in the balloon in the corner"

it has generic drivers to deal with devices before the real drivers can be found

"shouldn't they work?"

some devices need the extra support provided by the intended drivers, so the generic ones cause issues in those cases

"ok, well, where do I find them?"

do you have a model number?

"yes, it's " # scrubbed for... privacy? i dunno

gimme a few minutes

<insert 45 minutes of aggressive Googling for (str(DEVICE_MODEL_NUMBER) + " xp drivers")>

alright i have the drivers, go here:
# again, removed for... idk.

"they don't work"

# oh here we go

why not?

"These drivers are not compatible with your system architecture."

what version of XP are you using?

"XP Pro"

x86 or x64?

"x64"

# fucking...

ok so this is gonna get real complicated real fast: use x86 XP or I can't help you, none exist for x64 XP.

"oh ok"

<User left the IRC channel.>

"""

Send back my PC for RMA two weeks ago (likely dead CPU, but I just didn't know anymore)...
They send me a mail confirming that they have received it and a mail that they would start on it (along with some terms)...

Two weeks of waiting, no news at all...
Mailed back: "Oh sorry, we forgot to add the line asking whether you agreed with our terms..."

Two weeks of not being able to properly sit at my desk, play games, work on code reasonably (with my 3 screens) and edit videos I still need to finish because they forgot a stupid line in their mail --'

yesterday I had to use a Windows VM.

Took me less than 5 minutes to remember why I'm no longer using it.

- I'm doing nothing; CPU is at 100%
- Laggy AF
- Windows Updates not only download, but also install themselves and restart my OS automatically
- right after restart it starts downloading and installing another set of updates (restarted my PC while I was away, I come back - all my work is gone. And this dumbass Windows has a popup "I want to install more updates. When should I restart?")

ooohhh the horrors

How do you get over the bad times? I keep having to work with shitty legacy systems that were written in perl and flash in the 90s, but my boss keeps telling me "No" on redoing some of the bigger stuff even though it is really needed. I mean, that is your goal here, right? Rebuilding this POS? FFS you still stored passwords in plain text twoo weeks ago! But no, you's rather dig around in Perl than upset some random user because his fucking interface looks different.

But then I also have to work with another system that I could redo in Cake/Laravel in two weeks (it's literally getting and writing data to one table, so two views and user auth), and the previous dev just... made a huge mess. I mean, why would you need to post data asynchronously when it's this one stupid form ? Just do a regular form submit? And the system is really not suitable for extending, because everything is in the database, EVERYTHING! Like, html form inputs? So to add a simple input to the template I have to create a new input type in the types table and then add that to the form structure table? Only to have the input checked by fucking regex? REGEX! Why? Seriously, this is not some high end CMS that needs this level of code reusability No. This is a simple fucking form.

And I can't get it to work. No documentation of course. No comments, either. All of this makes me feel like I'm just the shittiest dev ever. I feel dumb, and useless. Haven't turned on my private PC in weeks because I see no reason to work on any of my own stuff.

I used to have a job, working with Magento and Wordpress. And yeah, it was horrible, it was chaos, but it was fun and I was great at it. I bent that motherfucking system to fit my needs. People respected my opinion, they were convinced I could program this and that, and I proved them right. Did I make mistakes? Hell yeah. Did I give up? Fuck no!

But now, I just feel like I can't even write a simple fucking form any more. I'm just so close to giving up on development as a whole, even though I love it so much.

When your PC stuck and tell no I/O device detected....and next thing it suggest to install I/O drivers...

Oh I see this machine can't even work on Ethernet....

Some time ago at work, I verified a system design by running the whole thing in my head, bombarding it with various fault conditions in all phases in order to check whether I had forgotten anything. I had my eyes closed, and my PC was not even switched on. Right in that moment, the boss of my department came in.
He: what are you doing?
Me, without opening the eyes: thinking.
He: don't you want to code?
Me, eyes still closed: no.
He: (leaving)

Windows 10 updating, decides it would be cool to install gigabytes of sdk, edge, and other bloatware without asking first, on a metered connection i use for work.

Guys, between you there and those fanboy demons in cupertino, one wants to just shut it all off and return to monke.

Sidenote this, because all of this nonsense started on that crap called Windows 8, which was in the end caused to copy that Unholy crap (sold as gold) that is Apple's range of products. It's a company that sells designs nowadays, like Prada, to say, Jobs era is long gone. Everything related to Apple, Mac, Safari, Development, Gaming, UI/UX, productivity and whatever is a

f***ing Nightmare.

We alreay have a global plague, and Apple exists, we dont' need you too making another catastrophe.

All this said,
Use your goddamn trillions to create your own customizable environment that is stable, fast, and WITHOUT BULLSHIT.

I don't give a mindflying F**k of the blurs, i know how to place them with a shell, if i need those. I want control, the shit i decide is going to happen, to happen fast.
This is of Critical importance, because it defines my productivity. And considering we're all sealed indoors since 2019, i want to get away from my pc asap and live my life, instead of spending time(and money, in this moment of emergency) fixing your F**kfests, or else seeing my pc slowing down to death.

First: IF i want stuff on my pc, I know how to install something, thank you.

Second: You can take it, all your Useless - Bugged as Hell - Nonsensical - and of no practical use Bloatware, and shove it deep in your Backdoor.
I'll debloat my pc with batches again, and there's nothing you can do to stop me doing that at every update you force me into.

So please, stop wasting my time, and yours.

The CI infrastructure and external tooling at the company I work at is a complete joke. Feels like it was designed by an intern left alone.

95% of the time a build fails or hangs, it's because we are getting race conditions or a hanging VM with our crappy Windows jenkins slaves. Quite possibly because we are not using proper tooling for monitoring those VMs as well. Anyways, I don't have access and control on it and it's not even my job to fix it.

Though, I am being asked to monitors these pieces of junk jenkins jobs outside of my work hours because company devs all over the world use it... but there is no fucking way to know it failed unless I log onto jenkins every hour and check everything manually... which is stupid as fuck for a software engineer.

I can't even implement slack hooks to get notifications or something when it fails because we will stop paying for it soon, so I have to connect to my freaking VPN on my PC and check everything.

And what's the fucking ghetto solution instead of fixing it properly? Restarting VMs and rerunning a build. Because someone in management wants to see a passing build, even though it means jackshit. Half of these jobs are tagged as unstable, so what's the fucking point?

Pisses me off when people work like morons and pressure others to do the same.

So today I gave my superiors at work a piece of my mind about the pc I sit on (I was/am not happy about it). I am expected to use Photoshop and Illustrator on a pc with 8gb ddr3 1333mhz and no graphics card, except for the one integrated in Intel's processor, which also is super outdated. Like you couldn't get more than $80 for the entire machine. So, today I ranted towards them irl and my message has finally seemed to sink in. Fuck.

So... about how I fell in love with coding

I was 12 years old when I went to mom’s work because I had nothing else to do. There was an iMac. At that time I used to have a PC at home with a Windows OS. When I approached MacOS at my mom’s office I had no idea what to do. Right before my mom had told me that I shouldn’t delete anything, all the documents are really important on there. So guess what I Did? In order to download Counter Strike 1.6 game I decided to install Windows OS on the iMac which deleted everything that was on the computer! Absolutely everything! So.. my mom told me to fix this after, and then I started to do some research and somehow learned python and javascript in next two months. Thanks to my mom!

Any Windows Sysadmins here? I have a question for you - How do you do it?

I only very rarely have to do something that would fall under "Windows System Administration", but when I do... I usually find something either completely baffling, or something that makes me want to tear our my hair.

This time, I had a simple issue - Sis brought me her tablet laptop (You know, the kind of tablets that come with a bluetooth keyboard and so can "technically" be called a laptop) and an SD card stating that it doesn't work.

Plugging it in, it did work, only issue was that the card contained file from a different machine, and so all the ACLs were wrong.

I... Dealt with Windows ACLs before, so I went right to the usual combination of takeown and icacls to give the new system's user rights to work with the files already present. Takeown worked fine... But icacls? It got stuck on the first error it encountered and didn't go any further - very annoying.

The issue was a found.000 folder (Something like lost+found folder from linux?) that was hidden by default, so I didn't spot it in the explorer.

Trying to take ownership of that folder... Worked for for files in there, safe for one - found.000\dir0000.chk$Txf; no idea what it is, and frankly neither do I care really.

Now... Me, coming from the Linux ecosystem, bang my head hard against the table whenever I get "Permission denied" as an administrator on the machine.

Most of the times... While doing something not very typical like... Rooting around (Hah... rooting... Get it?! I... Carry on) the Windows folder or system folders elsewhere. I can so-so understand why even administrators don't have access to those files.

But here, it was what I would consider a "common" situation, yet I was still told that my permissions were not high enough.

Seeing that it was my sister's PC, I didn't want to install anything that would let me gain system level permissions... So I got to writing a little forloop to skip the one hidden folder alltogether... That solved the problem.

My question is - Wtf? Why? How do you guys do this sort of stuff daily? I am so used to working as root and seeing no permission denied that situations like these make me loose my cool too fast too often...

Also - What would be the "optimal" way to go about this issue, aside for the forloop method?

The exact two commands I used and expected to work were:
takeown /F * /U user /S machine-name /R
icacls * /grant machine-name\user:F /T

I have a rant. A genuine rant, not a funny story, etc.

I want a keyboard. I need one. It can cost €500, as long as it won't break in a year and fulfils all my needs. Make it a €1000, I don't care. What are my needs then? Well...

It has to be a split keyboard - two halves. But wireless in every aspect, ergonomic, with multimedia keys on its outer edges (preferably pointing outwards, not up) and a heavy metal trackball on the right outer edge (preferably upper right corner). That's a bare minimum.

On top of that it probably some magnetic scrolls for things like navigating pages, changing volume and fidgeting in general wouldn't hurt. Also I'd prefer it to snap back into a one-piece whenever I need it to lie on my knees, e.g. when I type while sitting on a coach (I have a coach PC setup, no desk, and there's a reason). Why do I need it to split then...?

I had an accident. Kind of broke my back when I was 11. It's mostly okay now after couple years of rehabilitation and many more years of careful living. Luckily the only two wheels I ride on are powered by a 105.97 hp @ 9,970 rpm engine. Still, I try to be careful so I tried tons of work hygiene techniques over the years and I found out anything over 2 hours is best done while lying flat.

Coding while lying flat has its challenges, mostly focused around screen and input. Ever since I got a VR headset half of them got solved but the other half - acquiring a suitable keyboard - it's very hard to satisfy. I tried that with a one-piece keyboard lying on my stomach. Turns out actively bending elbows quickly wears them out (hello tennis players). So a split keyboard it has to be. So far I tried 4 different ones and I had to modify the cable connecting both halves in each and every one of them so that it'd be long enough to go behind my back. The main cable itself I only had to modify once because usually there're extensions available.

Apart from cables, all of those keyboards had issues. Starting from some kind of de-syncing when keys from both halves would randomly register in a wrong order - I didn't know it's possible with a cable connected halves... I did try two generic WiFi keyboards (using one for each hand) and they unfortunately suffered from that very same issue but I was sure it wouldn't happen if the device was designed to be a one unit from the very beginning, right? And yet it in 2 of the tested devices.

Other than that, plugs disconnecting on their own forcing me to take off the headset and fiddle around, too high key travel that'd strain the wrists after a few hours, even the noise that would wake up my girlfriend sleeping in a separate room were all a common issue (I briefly had an almost completely silent WiFi mechanical keyboard from Logitech we both really liked, but it was a one-piece). Once I got a split keyboard that was "natively" WiFi but not only the two halves were still connected with a cable that turned out to be way too short for my needs, it also had a very noticeable lag despite the high price - a lag way higher than any of the cheap WiFi keyboards I owned in the past. So I sent it back. Now IDK what to do because AFAICT there are no more models available, at least where I live.

So yeah, I need a keyboard and I'll probably have to make one myself. Sorry, just had to vent.

The worst technology i had to deal with was probably a piece of hardware. It was a mini-pc combined with sensors and digital IOs and thus, it should have been able to do process control all by itself.

At that time, there was hardware that did that, but this one had an intel cpu, windows embedded and some powerful libraries pre-installed.

Sounds good, didn't work. The thing was so unstable and buggy and crashed on everything. The sensor part had lots of parameters and the right order was trial and error, documentation didn't match behavior, fixes promised but never delivered.

Lucky for us: it was just a demokit, no real project.

I still remember it with a smile. We got in contact to that company at a trade fair and they had most impressive booth. I also remember their companies image movie from their homepage with developers in dark labs with holographic monitors and the boss in his shiny bright office as he looked out of the window and quoted a famous german author.

Hilarious and sad. :-)

## Learning k8s

Okay, that's kind of obvious, I just have no idea why I didn't think of it..

I've made a cluster out of a rpi, a i7 PC and a dell xps lappy. Lappy is a master and the other two are worker nodes.

I've noticed that the rpi tends to hardly ever run any of my pods. It's only got 3 of them assigned and neither of them work. They all say: "Back-off restarting failed container" as a sole message in pod's description and the log only says 'standard_init_linux.go:211: exec user process caused "exec format error"' - also the only entry.

Tried running the same image locally on the XPS, via docker run -- works flawlessly (apart from being detached from the cluster of other instances).

Tried to redeploy k8s.yaml -- still raspberry keeps failing.

wtf...

And then it came to me. Wait.. You idiot.. Now ssh to that rpi and run that container manually. Et voila! "docker: no matching manifest for linux/arm/v7 in the manifest list entries."

IDK whether it's lack of sleep or what, but I have missed the obvious -- while docker IS cross-platform, it's not a VM and it does not change the instructions' set supported by the node's cpu. Effectively meaning that the dockerized app is not guaranteed to work on any platform there is!

Shit. I'll have to assemble my own image I guess. It sucks, since I'll have to use CentOS, which is oh-so-heavy compared to Alpine :( Since one of the dependencies does not run well there..

Shit.

Learning k8s is sometimes so frustrating :)

Visual studio code

I usually use IDEs and am in love with everything made by Jetbrains. I am also to lazy to setup dual boot on my pc, so I live with windows 10. After one of the recent downgrades Microsoft distribute, they shipped this lightweight text editor called visual studio code with it.

It lied to me, that it's a good editor for coding C. It even tells me that I can compile and execute the code from inside the editor, similar to vim. I went to the settings and found a dark theme, for the best best feature this "editor"has to offer.

I give it a try by opening a source file with a normal double click. Editor gets focused, but the code is nowhere to be seen. Retrying conforms my, that this piece of shit is literally not able to open files UNLESS you drag and drop them into the editor. HOW FUCKING USELESS IS THAT?

Next I want to compile the program. Guess what, that functionality was not given or at least I could not find it (same goes with the manual)

Even with dark theme it burns my eyes to use this editor. There are almost no useful shortcuts. The functionality is not even comparable to vim. I always thought eclipse was bad, until this shit was installed.

It might work well for other people. Maybe it has functions, that just don't work on my pc, but from what I've seen: visual studio in general and especially that editor feels like Microsoft trying to replace the toolet paper with sandpaper.

!!rant life toptags bottags
My tags seem to be okay. Let's go.
I'm 14. I live in a place where nobody smart lives, and the school I go to has no coders.
Last year, all my friends moved. The only friend I had left now hates me, simply because they yelled at me everyday and I yelled at them once.
I am in the middle of my exams. I also have the flu, but thankfully it's not the e-flu, otherwise you guys should prepare for 24/7 headaches.
Due to the medications I am taking, I'm half-asleep all the time, and I probably am messing up all of my grades.
My entire extended family is in India, and I go there 2 times a year. I miss them so much right now :(.
At the same as doing exams, I am trying to keep my laptop (primary) and PC (secondary, desk) configuration and setup approximately synchronized. In order to do that, I am setting up my dotfiles repository.
Except that all my laptop config (which works) is written horribly, and I need to rewrite it all.
At the same time, I have 3 other projects going on: An OS written in D, a source-based package management system written in D, a small website (not online), and a whatever's cooking in my mind at this moment.
Right now, I'm supposed to be studying for my French exam.
Instead, I'm here, typing this out on my phone.
I have a classmate in school who can type QWERTY at 80WPM. I'm learning Dvorak (Programmer's!) and my current speed is 33WPM, after about 2 months of half-hearted practise during work time and at school.
Sometimes, I look at the world we have here, and what we're doing to it, and I wish that sometimes we could simply be content with life. Let's just live, for once.
I find ~60 random songs in one go, simply by finding a song I know on YouTube and going to the 'Mix - <song>' playlist. I download them all (youtube-dl), and I listen to them. Sometimes, I find this little part in a song (Mackelmore & Ryan Lewis - Can't Hold Us beginning instrumentals, or Safe and Sound chorus instrumentals) that make me feel so happy I feel like all's good in the world. Then the song moves on and with it, my happiness.
I look at Wayland, and X, and I think - Why can't we have one way of doing things - a fixed interface to express anything, so that one common API exists for everything of that type? And I realise it's because they feel that they're missing something from the others. Perhaps it's a bug nobody's solved or functionality that's missing, and they think that they can do better than that. And I think - Well, that's stupid. Submit a fucking bug report or pull request instead of reinventing the wheel. And then I realise that all the programming I've ever done in my life IS simply reinventing the wheel. And some might say, "Well, that guy designed it with spokes and wood. I designed it with rubber and steel," but that doesn't work, because no matter what how you make it, it's just a wheel. They both do the same thing. Both have advantages and disadvantages, because nothing's perfect. We're not perfect because we all have agendas and wants and likes and dislikes and hates and disgusts and all kinds of other crap, and our DNA's not perfect because it manages to corrupt copy operations (which is basically why we die of old age, I think).
And now I've lost my train of thought and this is too large to scroll over so I'm just going to move on to the next topic. At this point (.), I have 1633 letters left.
I hate the fact that the world's become so used to QWERTY because of stuff that happened 100 years ago that Dvorak is enough of a security to stop most people from being able to physically use my laptop.
I don't understand why huge companies like Google want to know about me. What would you do with this information? Know how to take over my stuff when the corporation-opocalypse comes around? Why can't they leave me alone? Why do I have to flash a ROM onto my phone so that Google cannot track me? What do you want, Google?
I don't give a shit any more, so there's my megarant.
Before anybody else (aside from myself) tells me that this is too big, all these topics are related simply because my train of thought went this way. There's a connection between each of these things, but I just don't know what it is.
Goodnight, world. 666 is the number of characters I have left. So is 42, for that matter (thanks, Douglas Adams!). Goodbye.

You ever had a boss that made you feel like his bitch but he never really earned the title
You also know from a technical skill perspective you’re more competent.

And the only job he seems to do is micromanaging you. He just puts things under a microscope looking for a flaw. He always finds a flaw so in the off chance it breaks he’s always in the clear.

He’s the guy who sticks with the programs the he was taught when he was still at school and never really tried something new out of the box. He gives the reasons the he wasn’t formally trained in the other programs . I’m not talking cinema 4 here. I’m talking Matlab preference over python. Using lab-view as a production level development platform instead of going to something more approved by the industry.

He doesn’t take risk but he pushes those risks on you so if you fail he can say it wasn’t him

He’s never wrong but he’s never right either.

You’re sitting there doing the cunt work and breaking the sweat and he passes the achievements as under his management. You never really get the credit because “he guided you “. You go through hell fixing bugs and he disappears. He says he’s always a call away when what you really needed is someone taking the heavy tasks not throwing the entire project on your back.

I never call that piece of shit bcz he just throws some other bullshit that doesn’t make sense and emphasizes that might be the problem.

I once had a problem with the com port on a pc and was trying to figure out the problem. I asked him and he said that it might be bcz I’m connecting to the PC via VNC. I was like what the hell. What does that have to do with anything. I just ended up restarting the port and it bloody worked.

The saddest part is that I’m scared is that I might end up like him. In the same dead end job. Even though he guides me we work in a place where the job title doesn’t really change. Funny thing is that officially I have the same job title as him .

He’s been in the place for 5years when I came. Can someone imagine that? To work and work and then to be seized up with another brat who’s the same as you title wise.

You’re close the age of 40 and you work in a place where a 20 something year old walks in with the same Position as you.

I worry that I might end up the same if I stay long enough. That I’ll learn everything I can learn and just stop progressing and the only thing I can do is say how shit can break but wouldn’t know how to fix .

Pointing out problems because they are easier than fixing. Just plomonting into existential nihilism with no purpose.

I once told him I wanted to quit. He pretended he didn’t hear it. He then then said what do you see in this job in 5 years
I told him me not in it.
He said “seriously what do you want in this place “
I said “if I’m still her in 5 years I’ll be missing a toe because I would have shit myself in the foot”

I now realize that by convincing me to stay he might have convinced himself that staying for that long wasn’t a bad idea. He was looking for justification that he’s decision wasn’t that bad at all.

You give your life to a job and at the end it takes one away.

I don’t want to be like that and I think that’s what bugs me the most. That I’m so close to this individual that I feel sooner or later if I’m not careful I’ll end up in the same place. The same dread

After waiting for almost a month, yesterday I went to check on how my computer was doing, since I hadn't got any messages or calls ever since.
I go to the store and ask one of the workers about how my laptop is doing, and that I'd left it there almost a month ago and that they'd tell me when it was time to get the papers and then the laptop itself. The girl asks me for my phone number and then my name, and found nothing on the computer. She goes somewhere inside the store and comes back with a colleague, who tells me that I need a process paper. I pull out the receipt the technician photocopied and signed because that was the only thing I had. I hadn't touched that part of my paste for the whole time after I left the computer there and I was 100% sure I didn't have the process paper with me until he started pressing me for it. I kept repeating that the technician told me that they'd call or message me when said process paper was ready, which I hadn't got any of those to go pick it up. The guy asks me if that were the number and name I'd given the tech guy and I said yes. Both of them disappear into the store again. They come back with a cardboard box and say that the surname written there was wrong by a char (as I've said before my name is unusual, and my surname is also unusual where I'm studying, but where I'm from there's like 5 or 6 families with that surname), so that's why they couldn't find it in the computer. After that they went through all the details I gave on the time of handing the PC and the number they told me was there was off by miles. I think I may have said a wrong digit but that number was way off. There should be some person who got calls or messages about a computer they don't even own LoL
They told me to try it and see if it was running OK and that I had 15d to go back if something was wrong
When I got home I turned it on, afraid it would start dying on me again LoL
I pass the login screen and the fan just starts working really hard and I'm worried. The ASUS guys reinstalled Win8 and the CPU is running wild already, going at about 3,5 GHz (2,5 max) and over 30% usage on nothing
After some minor inconveniences (making the USB with Win10 took longer than expected) I finally installed Win10 and the CPU usage drops to < 10% and runs at way below the 2,5 GHz max. It constantly uses <= 10-15% CPU and the fan makes no noise unless I put in a heavier game (like Oxygen Not Included - it asks for 4GB RAM minimum 8I), in which case it goes up a bit and runs at around 3 GHz, but it doesn't make as much noise as before, thank jesus. I'm gonna keep trying to see how it does and hope I don't have to go back to the store after the next 15d 8I
I can finally work and not be a leech on my friends because my old toshiba - which I forgot I'd brought with me to uni - is really old and it makes a lot of noise (the fan is constantly working too much but it's so old I don't bother anymore) and it heats my room a lot, so it's gonna be a nice change of pace HaHa

Made the mistake of restarting my pc at work this morning. Came up with configuring Windows, do not turn off.

30 minutes later, same message showing.

Despite message saying don't turn off, i had had enough and turned it off, think it would be completely broken.

Booted fine, no issues?!?! Thanks Microsoft.

Rant time. Oh boi.

So, a bit of context: I am a university student in Greece and I have a desktop PC with elementary OS on it. When the unis closed down because of Coronavirus, I moved back to my parents', without my PC, only a usb stick with elementary OS installed on it. That was before the lockdown. My parents have a desktop PC and my old laptop, both with Windows rn. I'm only able to work using Linux, so I've been just popping that elementary OS USB stick whenever I needed to work.

All cool and good. Until the usb got full. It was a 16GB one after all. No biggie, I bought a new 64GB one from a well known Greek tech shop along with a webcam my mother needed. It was a LEXAR one.

They fucking took a week to transfer it. As if the closest shop to me was in fucking Germany. For context, the drawing tablet I bought from China the other day only did 2 weeks to come. During this time I could barely use Linux because my USB stick had only some 600MB free.

Ok, wtv I said to myself. I am a patient person after all. I received the USB stick, along with the webcam, in good condition, in their packaging. Alright. I dd'ed everything from the 16GB stick to the 64GB one and then I extend the partition. Everything works flawlessly. And it's faster too.

Next day, I boot up from it again. It boots up good. Nice, time to do some work. I open my editor. And it fucking freezes. The editor is not some VSCode or Atom or any of that heavy shit, it's just elementary OS Code. A very lightweight Gtk3 app. Strangely though, the rest of my OS (the dock autohide, eg.) Seems totally responsive. I try to open another app. No luck. Not even switching TTYs work. Good shit. I force shutdown my PC. I try to boot again from that piece of shit. And guess what! NO BOOT BITCH. Like, fuck you. I boot from my previous 16GB one. Linux won't recognize it. No /dev/sdc like I used to have. Ok, lsusb. Nope, nothing. I disconnect it and reconnect it, and lsusb. An empty entry appears.I run it a couple of times, and the it disappears again. I switch to TTY 2. I get read errors and usb error -71.

And I want to fucking explode

I call back to support for the warranty coverage. I wait for a good 10 minutes and a nice lady picks up. I tell her the issue. She says that the support team will call me for the issue this day it the next day.

I hang up.

It feels like some fucking prank. YOU MOTHERFUCKING TOOK SO LONG TO DELIVER MY SHIT. Not to mention that the shitty courier service they are working with wouldn't deliver the goods to my home because it's slightly out of town. AND NOW YOU ARE DELAYING MY WARRANTY RETURN? HOW THE FLYING FUCK DID YOU BECOME A WELL KNOWN TECH SHOP WITH SUCH SHITTY SERVICE?

IF YOUR BRAINS WERE DYNAMITE YOU WOULDN'T HAVE ENOUGH TO BLOW YOUR NOSES.

YOUR THE SERVICE EQUIVALENT OF A PARTICIPATION AWARD.

Foreigners' view of Greeks suddenly doesn't seem so unreasonable. Yes, we are fucking lazy asses. And we also hate that. We hate each other for that very reason. May this country not live any longer.

i'm living in a different country because of work, parents ranting in phone "the PC is slow" well fuck, that hdd was old when i built that PC so i wanted to change the hdd for my ssd anyway

Goes home for a little time period.. no time to order things. Turns out, hdd meanwhile died on them... well what a good thing i have this ssd in my old notebook, so its not a problem.

*turns on old notebook with 4 yo ssd* ...its dead too.

wtf, i'm so mad right now

My brother-in-law's mother's face when she was telling me that she was forced to use 2FA Microsoft Office for work..
"They think we're all IT ppl or what"

Just realise how complex the "simple" 2FA activation step is for someone without the slightest IT curiosity. Not super-democratic either.. (eg. For someone who uses a library PC and has no phone)

Fucking remote db doesn't want to work with me and workbench. DB is on an empty test server, no firewall issues on the network, powershell on my pc says ping ok, tcp failing though, server firewall not running, server up and running.
Tried to modify network access on db configs like bind-adress, set my db user "host" value to wildcard. Now I can log in on workbench with my user, yet root somehow fails, wtf?
And of course once the connection is live, no db us visible, accessible, nothing works. I'm so frustrated. About to nuke it and restart ... again!

Lels....i think we have the day off and no one in my team told me so :V so here I am sitting at work waiting to see someone walk through the door. In all honesty. I would not mind :v my work pc os fairly powerful and I can do with the comfy chair.

Wanted to work from home as usual. Logged in in citrix with my credentials and totp, started rdp to connect with the bank.
i try it for the first time: failed to connect
I try it for the second time: error 0x112d (some thing about two programs that have an the same port open)
I ask my colleagues to look after the pc in the office and what was it:

FUCKING WINDOWS UPDATE FILLED THE RAM COMPLETLY.
Luckily no data was lost, since i had everything important commited and pushed.

This happened 2 years ago. With 1 year c++ application development experience in a big firm, the new company hired me as "intern". That moment I was like ok ok whatever then the nightmare began. They forced me to code on windows xp with visual studio200x with an old ass c++ (much older than my previous work, there's no string data type) and it has to work on IE. I told my supervisor that this code is obsolete and I need a new windows, IDE, and newer c++ to work on. He said he will get it done. 1 month passed I still sat my ass on the same chair with an old ass pc in front of me. Best thing I could do was designing a new web ui yet they still force me to work on their unfinished obsoleted codes. Well u know what? I quit 😒

So I use 4 differents setups in my life nowadays

My main PC at my home, which is on Windows 7
My PC at work, which is on Windows 8.1
My Cloud PC for gaming and video editing, on Windows 10
My travelling PC, which is on Ubuntu.

The Ubuntu, it's okay, no problem. But trust me, that's a real pain in the ass to switch from one OS to another.

So, I decided over the weekend that I would move my entire dev environment to Linux. No Windows on the laptop and only as a backup boot system for my home PC. I wanted to wean myself off of Linux as only being a VM and move to the full blown desktop.

I can only describe my experience to that of having your first kid: lot's of crying and joy at the same time.

Things I've learned:
1. The install is amazingly painless. Wi-Fi and Bluetooth work straight out of the box no configuring needed.
2. OH MY GOD THE CUSTOMIZATION. Rocking Arc Dark theme on Gnome3 = EVERYTHING IS
ALWAYS DARK MICROSOFT WHY IS THIS NOT A THING.
3. Getting Java servlets to work has been hell. I gave up trying to get them to work in eclipse and moved over to IntelliJ. More trial and error before I can figure out why tomcat won't fucking work in eclipse but it's fine in IntelliJ.
4. The UI and overall work flow has been improved after getting past the learning curve. Gnome3 is way better from when I tried it out 4 years ago.
5. Vim has a steep learning curve but I am starting to understand the net benefits of it. It'll probably be a solid month before I get good with it.
6. Loosing Microsoft Office has been a little bit of a challenge but their suite is online so....meh. I do miss Visual Studio though, and am still looking for an adequate replacement for C++ and C# development.

Overall it's been a challenge but I think it's been a net gain. Now if only I could get the whole sys-admin team to use it. ;)

Okay. So finally I moved into a new pc. Because I never worked in a company, I have absolutely no idea what is the proper standard workflow of developing a website. My work flow was the same in past 12 years, how I have learned in the school: Used xampp, developed everything, used git only locally, when stuff was ready I fired up Filezilla and uploaded everything, and used ssh to make the final adjustments. When I have made some changes, I just uploaded the files I have touched, in the same way, optimized if it was necessary, done. I wonder if someone can clarify me how a proper workflow looks like for php/laravel, mysql, nothing fancy. Is using xampp still okay? Or what is the industry standard procedure?

Disclaimer: This is all theoretical. Neither me nor my friend (with whom I discussed this) are stupid enough to even try to pursue this, but as an idea, i believe it might generate cool/new ideas/ways for handling secure communications across social groups.

Let's do some role play. Let's design a delivery app for drug dealers, think Seamless or Uber Eats, but for drugs. Not for big deliveries, like kilograms of coke, but smaller stuff. Maybe a few grams of it or something. The clients could rate dealers, and vide-versa. This would build a level of trust within the system. There would be no names, just anonymous reviews, ratings, and prices. Only the info you'd need to know.

The biggest (only?) problem we found (besides legality) was that, how would you prove that you're a client and not a snitch (or cop). This would have to somehow be handled both on signup, as well as when ordering (let's imagine that all who are clients are pure and won't ever snitch).

One of the ways we found to combat this was to have the app invite-only. This would, in theory, do away with the problem of having snitches signing up. However, what if the phone got stolen/breached by a snitch, and they also got full access to the account. One way we thought we could combat this would be with a "dispose number" or something similar. Basically, you call a number, or send a text, or message a Signal bot etc, which would lead to the account's instant termination, no traces of that user left. Hence, a dispose number.

The flow of the app would be as follows:
A client wants some amount of heroin. He opens the app, searches for a dealer, sends the him the desired amount, and in return gets back a price from the dealer. If both parties agree on the amount and price, the deal would start.

The app would then select a random time (taken from the client's selected timeframe and the dealer's "open" time) and a location (within a certain radius of both them, somewhere in between them both for convenience). If both of them accept the time and place, they'll have to meet up at said time and place.

The actual delivery could also be done using two dead drops - the client drops the money at one of them, the dealer drops the goods at the other one. Yes, this might be subject to abuse, but it wouldn't be that bad. I doubt that clients would make huge orders to unknown/badly rated dealers, as well as dealers accepting offers from badly rated clients. My idea is that they would start small, just so if they do lose their money/goods, the actual loss wouldn't be as big for them, but for the other party, having bad ratings would mean less clients willing to buy or dealers willing to sell.

A third way would be to use crypto, but the reason I left this as the last one is because it's not that wide-spread yet, at least not in local drug dealing. With this method, the client would initiate the order, the crypto would be sent to either the dealer or an escrow account, the dealer would then drop the goods at a random place and let the client know where to go to get them. After the client has gotten the goods, they could both review/rate the quality as well as the overall experience with that dealer, which would either make or break the dealer's upcoming deals. This would be pretty much like other DNM's, but on a local scale, making deliveries faster.

So far, this would seem like something that would work. Are there any ideas that might improve this? Anything that might make things more secure/anonymous?

My reason for this post is to spark a conversation about security and anonymity, not to endorse drugs or other illegal stuff.

Cheers!

PS. Really loving the new PC design of devRant

Just tried to Setup my elementary os on my Home pc..
The Shit wont work!! Damn!
No WiFi connection! I tried everything.. i think there is a Problem with my Driver.. I was so desperated that i created a Mobile Hotspot, it worked, I run apt get Update and Upgrade , this Shit used over 100mb of my Internet volume.. then i tried the Shit again ... Connect to my WiFi at Home... And it... Doesn't work... Shit!

So, this is a story of an experience a friend of mine had with Android Studio.

As part of our semester, we are required to make an application through Android Studio, and had no previous experience with it. We started to download and install it all which were a nightmare on its own to make it work.

While i got it to work in the end, she encounterred a big issue. Her pc was named after her name, which contained letters android studio did not understand (æ,ø,å) and made it absolutely useless.

After installing and uninstalling multiple times, she ended up making and entire new user called "F#ck Android Studio" just to make it work.

No idea if there was an easier way, but damn its been hell for her

Maxi-Rant, rest in the first comment!

Yay, I've caught up with my "watch later" list on YouTube! Next thing: Just quickly go through my subscribed channels and add old videos that I haven't seen yet to the watch later list so that I have more stuff to watch the next months. The easiest way to do that is to go to the "all uploads" playlist of the channel (that is luckily always linked now, it used to be hidden sometimes) and use "add all to" to get them on my playlist. Then sort out the stuff that I've already seen and turn on automatic sorting by date, easy. Yeah...
Firstly, in the new design there's no "add all to", I have to go to the old design. For my own playlists, there's a handy "edit" button to do that, but on other pages I have to do it manually. Luckily I have set Ctrl+Shift+1 as a shortcut for "&disable_polymer=true" long ago.
Next surprise: On "all uploads" playlists, there is no "add all to" button. It's on every single other playlist on YouTube, including "liked", "watch later", "favourites" and so on, just not there.
Fine, I'll just abuse my subscription playlist script that I already have by making a copy of it, putting the channel IDs in it and setting the last execution date to 1.1.2001. Little problem with that: Google apps scripts can run for at most 5 minutes and the YouTube API restricts it to add one video per second. So it doesn't work for more than 300 videos. I could now try to split it up by dates, but I didn't write the script myself and I don't know how it sorts the videos to add, so I'll just google for another solution instead.
Found one: Go to the video overview of the channel in the old layout, Ctrl+Shift+I, paste this little Javascript thing and it automatically clicks all the little clocks that add the video to the watch later list. Yay, that works! Ok, i'm restricted to 5000 videos, because that's the maximum size of a YouTube playlist, so I can't immediately add all 8000+, but whatever, that's a minor problem and I'll sort out later anyway. Still another little problem: For some reason I can't automatically sort the watch later list. Because that would be too easy.
But whatever, I'll just use "add all to" from there to add it to my creatively named "WL" list. If that thing is restricted by the same rate limit of 1 video per second, it should be done in about 1½ hours. A bit long, but hey, I'm dealing with 5000 videos. Waiting 2 hours... Waiting 3 hours... Nothing happens. It would be nice if it at least added them one by one, but no, it waits an eternity and then adds all at once. At least in theory, right now it does absolutely nothing.
Shortly considered running it for more hours or even days on my Raspberry Pi, but that thing already struggles when using Chromium normally, I shouldn't bother it with anything that has to do with 5000 videos.
Ok, what else can I do then? Googling, trying out different things, mainly external services that have their own concept of "playlists" and can then add them to an arbitrary playlist later...
Even tried writing my own Java program with the YouTube API, but after about an hour not even the example program in the YouTube API tutorial worked (50 errors and even more open questions, woohoo), so I discarded that idea.
Then I discovered "DiskYT". Everything looked like it would work and I'm still convinced that I can do it with that little pile of shit. Why is it a pile of shit? Well, for example the site reloads itself after a while, so it can at most add 700 videos to a playlist. Also I can't just paste the channel link (even though it recognises those links, but just to show an error message that it can't copy from channels). I can't enter/paste URLs, I have to drag them. The site saves absolutely nothing (should in theory work, but in practise it doesn't), so I have to re-drag everything on every try. In one network, the "authorise YouTube" button (that I have to press again on every computer) does absolutely nothing ("inspect" reveals that there isn't even any action bound to the button), in another network the page mostly doesn't work at all or the button to copy from playlists is suddenly gone or other weird stuff. Luckily I have the WiFi at home, there it works in theory. But just on my desktop PC, no other device, wow. I tried to run it on my new laptop, but it's so new that it still has the preinstalled OS and there I can't deactivate going to standby when closing the laptop, so while I expected it to add 5000 videos, it instead added 4 and went to standby. But doesn't matter, because it would have failed at about 700 anyway. Every time I try to use this website, I get new problems, but it seems to still be the best option, because everything else just doesn't do anything. This page at least got to 700 before.

Continuing in first comment!

Today is thursday. Oh no.

At thursdays I have a 8h30-19 schedule (I have 1h30' of free time to go home and cry after I finish a class at 15h30 though) and there's this one class I DREAD. It's a 2h class at 17h and it's an exercise class. This wouldn't be so bad it I actually understood the code behind the exercises, because they don't teach us code in the theory classes (btw it's C. I hate that language because of all this). The teacher pretty much tells us "do this exercise", waits like 10' and then starts to (try to) explain what we're supposed to do. Oh my god.
The other day he was like "write "exec ( ... "text" ... )", compile and execute". It didn't work. Of course it didn't why would it? I was switching around between terminal, manual and text editor, to no avail. In the end he explained but I don't think I got it.
Every time I think about this class I die a little inside and start to become somewhat anxious to be honest. The theory is not that that hard, the practice part is what is killing me (I have test in 2w but I'm just gonna start studying earlier so I can go watch this match LoL).
Does someone know a good book (preferably online, if possible) or a good website on C? I really need to read that, that language is killing me.

Bonus: the other day I had to do a homework that was to be delivered. We had to write a program that read the program and its arguments like this:

./program_name
numArgs
arg1
arg2
etc

I wrote the code, had some bumps in the way, asked a colleague for help because we needed to have a custom function made that was to be done in the class but that I couldn't make because of the reasons above. Then it came the time to test. My VM broke (I think I'm gonna format my PC to try to fix that. Have installed some other versions of the VM but the installations fails or the machine doesn't start) so I sent it to said colleague to test. She said it did OK and so I sent the work to this website we have to send our works to.
"2 errors".
What? What happened? She said it worked just fine.
Looked at my code, couldn't see anything wrong.
Asked the same colleague for help.
Turns out I missed a space. A SPACE. I don't think I've ever felt so frustrated in my life. A presentation error in Java is a good thing, at least we know the program works fine, it's just the output that's wrongly formatted. But C? Nope, errors all around, oh my god. I'm still mad about it.
And I owe her a chocolate.

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

Microsoft have recently announced two things that are related to each other:
1. Windows 11 will be equipped with a built-in Copilot that will "see" everything the user does and store it locally (at least so they say).
2. A new PC, redesigned from ground up with AI in mind, called CoPilot+ PC, will be released in June.

I'm not sure if any of this is good news. It's disturbing enough that MS Word interfers with my work by displaying "friendly" pop ups about how Copilot can assist me. And there seems to be no way of turning the damn thing off. I don't want to use Word anymore, but at work I'm forced to use Microsoft's shitty office applications. So now I'm resorting to WordPad, which has a much cleaner interface and hasn't yet been infected with M$ Artificial Idiot CockPilot.

How the fuck can people acutally work with freaking windows?!

I use a dual boot with ubuntu and windows, the only reason why there is a small piece of windows is because i like to play games some time, and the freaking developers who are coding them are afraid of windows or whatever ...

Anyway, i wanted to try something with windows and app virtualization which required me to use windows. Holy shit everything is so freaking complicated if you want to do it not with a gui. Need some admin rights, ... no dont use the terminal you need to right click 'run as admin' and shit. I mean wtf?!

How can people who have a freaking idea of what they are doing using windows?!

Every f*cking minute with that shitty os feels like a hour. 2 blue screens so far, and it seems m$ decided to download some updates that freaking block my work and getting my pc to lag ... what a piece of sh*t!

Installing a third OS in my PC (Manjaro, alongside Win10 and OSX Mojave). I do not remember how I configured dual boot for Win10 and OSX and now I have no clue of what I'm doing. Nothing will boot and I'm having to boot OSX through clover installed on my USB stick. Good thing I'm on quarantine and have a lot of time to play with this. Oh wait not really since I have some college work to do and I need Linux for that. Yay.

Dealing with relationships when you are a night owl. I don't burn the midnight oil like in my twenties but I don't want to go to sleep at 1030pm. Midnight is typical but I feel my actions affect my missus as she can't sleep when I'm not there...that said..she has issues sleeping anyway or nodding off. Whereas I can fall asleep in front a TV that's on no problems or whenever my head hits a pillow. I sleep on the couch when I stay up so I don't disturb her. Or does everyone here have a cushy work life balance job where you only work 9 to 5 and don't need to be on the pc.

Incoming rant.

I have 4 years professional experience at a small shop working on a web application for property and liability insurance. The application is ASP.NET with C# as the code-behind. I have a BCS and will finish my MSIS fall 2017. I have no idea why I have the degrees. I know that when I enrolled, it seemed like they would be a nice addition to an otherwise empty resume. I was lucky enough to land my first and only development job during my sophomore year of my undergraduate program. Is this enough experience to land a new job?

I feel like I'm learning nothing at my current job. The specs that come in seem very vague to me. When asked for clarification, there is often push back, and I don't know whether that's because I don't have enough experience to parse what the client means in the two sentence spec I got or if it's because the client does not actually know what they want.

I hate my current job. My productivity is low because I spend more time trying to figure out what the client wants and analyzing an 8 year old system that has 0 documentation. I know some of you will just say, "Suck it up" at this point, but I really want another job. The only thing I like about this job is that it's 100% remote. It also pays $60k a year, so a replacement should be at least that salary.

Most postings I see require professional experience of 5 years or more, and knowledge of other frameworks. I can work on getting knowledge of the other frameworks, but will have no professional experience with them. I don't live in an area with a lot of software development jobs, and the ones I see are for non-IT organizations that want 1 person to run a distributed system from 10 or more locations. A hospital system out here wants to pay $30k a year for a guy to be both software developer for new tools as well as the helpdesk and IT support guy that's on-call for four locations in the county. I made more than that before I got into the development industry, for less work, and would rather leave than settle for something like that.

I've thought about moving to somewhere near San Francisco or San Jose, but I have my daughter to think about. I have joint custody of her, and would have to give that up in order to move out of the county.

I like programming and using it to solve problems. I like designing architectures and how all the components will interface. I like designing and normalizing databases. I like taking part in coding competitions for employers that are well-known (Amazon, Facebook, Uber, Twitch, etc.), even though I often just place middle of the pack. When that happens, I feel like I'm an imposter in this industry.

I think I have the most fun just working on small projects for personal use. My latest is an assistant calculator for the game Transport Fever to figure out cargo throughputs per annum based on the in-game timing information. Past projects have also been small. Ones I could use in a portfolio are a sudoku solver desktop application, PC/Web game in Unity that is a 3D FPS remake of Duck Hunt that allows open world exploration but locks the camera's viewpoint for shooting events, and a building assistant for Rome II: Total War that maps out all the bonuses/perks of user-specified building combinations in provinces so users can record their long term building plans without using all their turns to see the final results.

I seem to be an unproductive, average developer who dabbles in projects here and there.

This is what I want from other Ranters. Just say something. I don't care if it is, "Suck it up and get better." It could be your tips for finding and securing a new position. It could even be empathy, if such a thing exists on the Internet. Whatever you want, just say something that will help get me thinking of what the next steps in my career should be.

It's winter and it's quiet. Too quiet. My shitty job has me sitting here, waiting for work to appear. I could be at home working on something dev related and fun and meaningful to the progress of my life but no, I have to be here and I have to "look" productive for the bosses. I hate this shit, it's like prison, except I get paid, so I should be thankful. I can remote into my PC at home but I already got snapped for that, now I'm paranoid and afraid to try use this shitty downtime in a productive way.

Well, guess I better go sweep the already swept floors again to maintain the illusion of "work" for my penny dripping masters.

QQ having nothing to do is worse than too much to do.

So I just installed Elementary OS Loki on my older desktop and for that the wifi is incredibly slow, like 30 seconds to load googles home page. It also randomly stops working, and gives a no network connection. When this system was on windows I would average 50~ mb/s down speed, changing it to Linux I'm lucky to maintain 2mb/s. I've been googling for hours and nothing I try seems to work, any Linux pros here able to give me some suggestions. The network card in the PC is an Aetheros one, I it supports a,b,g,n and Bluetooth, I'm currently using the desktop with a Bluetooth mouse / kbd. (None of the hardware/setup has changed since using windows)

paying for windows is shit. I've a PC which i keep updated. it has corrupted the drives like 2 times in 3 years and the motherboard replaced twice cuz' the fucking BIOS update didn't take. I've a pirated windows 7 running on a PC that was bought in 2012, still no issues in 11 years. 11 fucking. Just lost 2 weeks of work 🥲.

Virtualbox stopped working on my pc at some point and I have no clue why. I've tried a lot of things, it just doesn't work

Windows Remote Desktop Connection for ALL of our VMs. No VPNs whatsoever. If an employee wants to connect to work from home, we have to set up RDP on their PC. 😐🔫

Ok... Can someone explain me this?
Happen a few weeks ago.
My pc would crach on any 3D program or game.
Did some tests, was the graphic card.
Send it to repair (amd, Asus made)
Placed my old Nvidia, installed drivers all good.
My new card came, nothing repaired, nothing found, passed all stress tests.
Placed the card back ok, no OS.
Bios detects both ssds but don't start (windows 10.... Ya tryed Linux but doesn't work for my main past time in pc, Arma 3).
Loaded the USB with the windows instalation, used command line drive C is completely empty but has 160gb used.
Ended ip formating.
GC works perfectly.
So... Wtf happen?

!rant
Experienced devs please tell help me.

Learning software development has been a challenge. Many times it's frustrating.

I also learn languages and I find them to share one trait with software development, which is complexity.

At first I looked at languages the way I'm currently doing with software. I'd look in a new language and after decided it's cool to learn it, I would stare at it for a few weeks trying to realize what the heck I was going to do. I wouldn't even know how to get started.

Eventually this stage goes away and I think that is about to happen with me with software.

But then a new challenge would come, which is me not making progress as I wanted. That's sort of happening with me by learning software as well, bit in language I now know how to deal with it.
That's because I work full time with something that isn't in my interests and when I arrive home Im tired and want to relax. So I decided my language learning had to go slower as long as I have this job, meaning no hours spent in front of books or a pc studying - that's what I could do with English, I was a teenager and had 12 hours a day to do whatever I wanted.

So I usually spent 5 minutes here and there learning something in my target language when I can, no frustration needed, my only rule is: practice everyday, even if I don't learn anything new.

With software, that doesn't apply though.

So, what I mean by tracing a parallel between these to fields is that I have a strong conviction is that once you get the principles on how a certain kind of learning works, you can apply it everywhere in the field. But with software it's been harder.
Anyways, I see that are some principles that apply, cause trying to learn software is changinge and teaching a lot of things like:

*you have to read a lot (of documentation) . At first I thought all documentation was painful to read and understand, but I found out some software are well documented and one can use those only to get used with it.

*immersion / discipline are important. I'm not very disciplined, I'm better with immersion but both are important if you need to acquire complex subjects/skills

*how to deal with complexity. I installed Arch Linux a few days ago. Just to install it I ended up reading more than 20 pages of documentation (install guide, Wpa supplicant, systemd, networkd, xorg, etc etc). Gradually I'm realizing that when you have to install/tweak something in that distro you necessarily spend a bunch of time trying to understand how it works, otherwise you don't get too far like in Ubuntu or Debian.

*and lastly the one that bothers me. Constantly getting frustrated and feeling crap about my poor skills. No matter how much I progress, it still seems like I'm stuck.
(that's when I ask your help/opinion :) )

I am having an introspective moment as a junior dev.

I am working in my 3rd company now and have spent the avg amount of time i would spent in a company ( 1- 1.5 years)

I find myself in similar problems and trajectories:

1. The companies i worked for were startups of various scales : an edtech platform, an insurance company (branch of an mnc) and a b2b analytics company

2. These people hire developers based on domain knowledge and not innovative thinking , and expect them to build anything that the PMs deem as growth/engagement worthy ( For eg, i am bad at those memory time optimising programming/ ds/algo, but i can make any kind of android screen/component, so me and people like me get hired here)

3. These people hire new PMs based on expertise in revenue generation and again , not on the basis of innovative thinking, coz most of the time these folks make tickets to experiment with buttons and text colors to increase engagement/growth

4. The system goes into chaos mode soon since their are so many cross operating teams and the PMs running around trying to boss every dev , qa and designer to add their changes in the app.

5. meanwhile due to multiple different teams working on different aspects, their is no common data center with up to date info of all flows, products and features. the product soon becomes a Frankenstein monster.

6. Thus these companies require more and more devs and QAs which are cogs in the system then innovative thinkers . the cogs in the system will simply come, dimwittingly add whatever feature is needed and goto home.

7. the cogs in system which also start taking the pain of tracking the changes and learning about the product itself becomes "load bearing cogs" : i.e the devs with so much knowledge of the product that they can be helpful in every aspect of feature lifecycle .

8. such devs find themselves in no need for proving themselves , in no need for doing innovative work and are simply promoted based on their domain knowledge and impact.

My question is simply this : are we as a dev just destined to be load bearing cogs?

we are doing the work which ideally a manager should be doing, ie maintaining confluence docs with end to end technical as well as business logic info of every feature/flow.

So is that the only definition of a Software Engineer in a technical product?

then how come innovations happen in companies like meta Microsoft google open ai etc?

if i have to guess as a far observer, i would say their diversity in different fields helps them mix and match stuff and lead to innovative stuff.

For eg, the android os team in google has helped add many innovative things in google cloud product and vice versa.

same is with azure and windows . windows is now optomissed to run in cloud machines when at one point it was just a horrible memory hogging and slow pc OS

for small companies, 1 ideology/product/domain is their hero ideology/product/domain .

an insurance company tries to experiment with stuff related to insurances,health,vehicles,and the best innovations they come up with is "lets give user a discount in premium if they do 5000 steps a day for an year".

edtech would say "lets do live streaming for children apart from static videos"

but Android team at google said , "since ai team is doing so well, lets include ai in various system apps and support device level models" ~ a much larger innovation as 2 domains combined to make a product

The small companies are not aiming to be an innovative product, they are just aiming to be a monopoly product. and this is kinda sad

I've been trying to find a linux distro/de that "just works" for like a week and honestly, I'm kinda giving up and going back to Windows.

Everyone single one I've tried had some weird quirks, mostly audio and video related. Screen tearing everywhere, mic not working, distorted audio, jittery animations and very low responsiveness.

I really wanted to use Linux as my main OS, at least for work. I love the simplicity of package managers and the terminal. But honestly, I don't understand how something like that could be depicted as better than Windows. I'm sorry but Windows runs waaaaaaaay better on my desktop and PC it blows linux out of the water. Zero issues with drivers, no screen tearing, no distorted audio flying smooth animations and responsiveness.

I'm very disappointed, I was expecting Linux to be quicker and less bloated but god those hardware compatability issues just destroy everything good that linux has to offer.

Guess I'm going to install some background VM since I only really need to run terminal stuff and daemons for work.

So, the story starts with me getting a job. Full-time job for the first time in my 21 years old life. After short conversation about how amazing this company is, after countless lies and stood questions they decided to hire me. I had to get come on Monday a week later with everything prepared.

So of course I did that and got to my workplace on designated time. Turned out nobody was expecting me, nothing was prepared for a new programmer and everyone seemed angry at me for no apparent reason.

After long talk with my new boss I got some less than 100$ pc with CPU that couldn't handle virtualization and expected me to work on software that needed extensive use of virtual machine.

PC is of course filled with all kinds of spying software that uses most of the resources. IT teams only job is to check if programmers are working their assess off for at least 8 hours a day.

I've filled a ticket about granting me access to Debian machine on the mainframe so I could work. No response for two weeks. I've lost hope already.

I have to work on open space with more than 30 engineers. Screams, phone calls, alarms, all at once, all the time. My colleagues seem to not care and I can't understand how.

I was tasked with rewriting major application because old developer did some half assed piece of burning shit. It took him more than one year, I'm finishing it in less than two weeks.

Of course nobody except for me is preparing any kinds of documentation. I had to reverse-engineer whole API for alarm system.

Salary is less than a junior programmer should earn.

But I'm stuck here for at least a year because nobody's here wants a guy whose only experience is as a freelancer.

I can't wait until I feel like Dr. Frankenstein when I build my PC this week. My first real computing rig!!

Some backstory: My main dev machine is my old Lenovo laptop running Ubuntu (my baby). I took Windows off of it when I got a Surface through a job and have been using that for Windows specific work. I'm going to be giving that to my little sister next time I travel home. In short, this is the first computer that will be able to cut through anything I throw at it and play games that aren't at least 6 years old.

The build is centered around an i5-8400 and gtx 1060 6GB, and I'll be running Windows as a primary OS for gaming. However, I fell in love with programming on Linux and there is no way Linux won't be on my machine. I understand the differences between dual-booting and virtualization, but I want to hear how you guys run Linux on your Windows gaming machines or if you go about it another way. I also have heard horror stories about drivers for Linux, and wonder if my graphics card being certified by Ubuntu LTS actually means that it will operate correctly. I have also only ran VMs on crappy computers so I haven't had any experiences where that performed better than dual-booting. I'd love some feedback or to hear about all of your setups, as hardware has never been my strong suit.

I'll post a pic of my setup when it's done too.

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.

I'll have to make some tough choices over the next 6 months. With my tech career beginning and my college education ramping up, time is of the essence, and the skills I develop now will be at the forefront of my future. So what does this have to do with Microsoft?

Well, the story begins in the Spring of 2016. Social Forums was about to turn a year old, Trump's campaign was ramping up, and I had just found my love for technology. With all my friends having phones, I had to get a phone and get working on development. The year before, Windows 10 was launched, and I was psyched. I found Microsoft's products to be underrated with potential. That day, I purchased a Lumia 640, upgraded it to Windows 10, and immediately began working. After another year-and-a-half gone by, I went from loving Microsoft, to defending Microsoft, to tolerating Microsoft. I could go on and on about the lousy structure, the privacy issues, the forced upgrades, the redundant developer platform, and other such issues that is leading me away from them. But if there is one thing they have proven over the years, is that the they are completely out of touch with its developers and its customers. They spent years ramping up their phones. They failed. They spend years ramping up their phones. They failed. They spend years ramping up their semi-annual OS updates. They failed. So why did they fail? It's not that they made the wrong prediction out of chance. They legitimately don't care about feedback. It's their way or the highway. This sounds vaguely familiar. They have been spending a decade ignoring feedback from the community because they want to become just like Apple. Right now, Apple LIVES off of brand loyalty and its stable, useful ecosystem. This cannot work for Microsoft as they don't have a lot of brand loyalty. But most of all, they don't have a working ecosystem. They have Windows Insiders, which provides them with hundreds of feedback messages per day. These include suggestions, bug reports, and constructive criticism. The feedback is public. You can have several pages of the same complaint, and they still won't do anything about it. They say they have a good relationship with their community, and that this Beta program helps Windows become better for all. But in the end, we are nothing more than a glorified unpaid labor force. They fired hundreds of professional debuggers just before the Insider Program took off. We are only here to provide bug reports for free. Now that their phones, AR headsets, browser, online services, and VR headsets are failing for all these reasons, I see little reason to develop for Windows anymore. I don't just mean their UWP and App Store platforms, I mean Windows as a whole. I'm definitely not a Mac guy either. I never see myself going to Mac either, as they are really no different in terms of how they treat their Developers and PC users. If things continue down this route, I will leave the platform all together. I've always wanted to be a Systems Programmer, so I don't really need an established paid platform to be successful. Even now, I'm not certain about leaving Windows altogether but as a developer, I need to find my place. Time is of the essence in my life, and I need to find out my place in the software world. Now I think it isn't on the Windows platform like I had dreamed it would be. But where do I go?

!all device related

Oh boy here we lads!

Had a pretty shitty few weeks lately but the other day sort of got a bit much, first my phone's cameras started to fail and now that I've had the screen replaced, it's not covered under hardware guarantee warranties anymore, the sensors aren't working, work hours are getting cut, receiving near on 10 emails saying they are declining my resume, TAFE have no IT courses, uni is too expensive, the house I was going to buy got sold, my PC is fucking up, I've hurt my back (for the 10 millionth fucking time), none of my projects are coming together, haven't slept properly for weeks now...

Why does it always have to fucking poor when it rains, when can I just get a fucking glimpse at some sunlight on the horizon...

Fucking hate to explain basic shit to computer illiterate. Usually I don't mind, but right know I working on the project, want to automate one thing I need to do every morning, put two numbers to web page(I will explain details maybe in next rant). So I am only one who fix, buys computers, printer(for some problems I call for other repair man.). Generally speaking working as IT guy. Firm has like 50 computers, some of them has SCADA software. Some computers have Win 7, some win 8 and others win 10, can't upgrade those computers, not enough money(I can deal with this problem). And yes, computer buying is not the fastest, easiest thing too. Because is public firm, I need to do public buying(I don't know how to translate to english), and most of the time wins the lowest price, I am ok with that. But I can't on item specification write I want that model pc or it components. Example: I can't write I want intel processor, however I can write number of cores, frequency. But it's not that bad, usually i have template for all things I buy. One of the worst thing is this, our firm bought new bookkeeping software version, old version was using visual foxpro framework. Good thing I didn't initiate the purchase, because right know I would be jobless, not because I would be fired, but because our senior accountant would drive me crazy. In fact accountants drive me crazy, but I can handle it for now. As I wrote before our form has about 120 workers, major part of workers are old, like my parents age. (I am 28 btw. Mom is 55.). As you all know what happens if you say you work with computers. So our accountants are like 60 years old, got new program, don't know how to work with it, and they ask me how to do certain things. if I don't know how to I ask program's support, every question is like 90 Eur. So in short accountants expect I should know their work and how program works. If I try say something they don't like, they try to make my day hard. Next thing is our billing program. Man that worked before me done some payments import. And when I came everyone expect me to do that. Ok I did that because that people working with billing program would probably fuck it up. And I semi automated that, so I don't mind that much. Sometimes that program fucks up, like it happened yesterday, it send email invoices attachment without filename. Example: people got this attachment ".pdf"(no filename, only extension), And if you save it you need do OPEN WITH command and then select pdf reader or rename file (I don't know what easier). And surprise surprise our firm, customer support redirects all phone calls, emails to me. But I did explain to customer support what to say to people. Still they redirect it to me.
PS: This is my first job after school. I work as part time.
TL;DR Thinking my life, carrier choices. accountants are not the nicest people.

For some reason, out of no where, I made this word up. It's called Moop, and it's definition is paradoxical. It means "everything and nothing, anywhere and nowhere, etc". So one day at work one of my coworkers pushed his untested commit to the master branch of our 25k project. To make matters worse, he deleted all other branches and previous versions of the project. Our project manager heard about it and became so angry that he almost broke our no-curse-word-policy. So he called is all together to get around it so he could properly vent.
Project manager: "Guys I'm extremely angry at James (the one who pushed the untested source code to our commercial project, ruining it)
Me: well, I have a word that we can use
Project manager: what is it?
Me: Moop
You can guess what the next few weeks at work was like. All of my coworkers had to fix the crap James made, including myself. So the conversations went like this: "The mooperfluffer James should have never mooped with us!", "MOOP YOU JAMES, I HOPE YOU HET MOOPED TO HELL YOU MOOPUP!!!!!", "Hey James, guess what! I hope you moop yourself". Our boss became a strong moop user and spray moop all over James workstation. We put moop in his cup, his laptop keyboard, even his thumb drive. We downloaded moop.exe to his PC so we could moop his kernel.

Today James' life is officially mooped.

I wish I could invite the me of 3-4 years ago to my room and prove him wrong.

Basically, the me of 3-4 years ago thought: "What do I need a home PC for? I got a laptop."; hell, he always forgot to put the laptop with the plural 's', because understandably, for his study life, he took low-cost PCs that would only last like one year.

But my boy, laptops are cool and all, but have you ever experienced the complete comfort of a proper desktop? In addition to the bonuses of a home PC in terms of performance, it leaves a much better space for work than just a portable terminal in front of you and pretty up close to compose. The accessories didn't even cost me much. And it feels great to have everything in its own, right place: the screen at the bottom, the phone standing on its holder, the earphones on your head, your left hand on a mat with papers potentially on it, your right hand on the mouse, which is on the mousepad and also on that mousepad, that character you adore so much, when both said hands are not on the keyboard, beneath the whole table, or on it when no papers are on the way.

Seriously, that pleasure I longed for was something you could have started, me of 3-4 years ago, right when I began with my studies.
But I have no rancor over you, I'm still onto my studies, so this is still something I can take profit of, during my student life, thankfully ;)

I'll just take note at your stead, of not being too stubborn over things that can do oneself a greater good, objectively. :)

Not really sure it can be called "dev" technology but I think it fits rather well.

My problem is my 4K screen. You see, I bought this PC around 1 year ago (a Dell Inspiron 15 7000 of those times) and it had the possibility to have a 4K screen and I said myself "Why not? Everything will look so much better!"
Silly me.
Many apps do not work so well with such high DPI and their UI and icons are less then 0.5cm large. It definitely was not worth it.

So my worst dev tech is any app that does not support high DPI or has no ability to change icon size (TexStudio does and I just love it!). Next PC a good old FullHD will suffice.

Finally purchased my t480s for university after mooonths of reading reviews and reddit posts. I hoped that the mbp refresh wouldn't be so expensive :( I've got a mid 2009 from work which no one used so they let me take it home and yeah to be honest i like it very much. i wanted learn programming for ios & android, but honestly paying 2,3K€ (student price for the 13" i5 16gb ram 512gb ssd) and having the risk of a (maybe or maybe not) failing keyboard and no chance of upgrading it is too risky for me and my wallet :( I paid 1,5K€ (again student price) for the thinkpad (i7 16gb ram 512gb ssd and the mx150) and i think i'll love it :)

Just wanted to share with you guys :) (i hope i didn't start a pc vs mac fight haha)

Yesturday when I got off work I turned my PC off and it installed some updates... Came in the today turned on the PC and the fucking Win 10 instantly crashes with Sadface of Death "could not run critical service"

Recovery does not work as usual... No safe mode no nothing!

Fuck you Microsoft just stop puting your nose in to hardware and fix your fucking software! Now I have to reinstall all of my development tools and other work related shit... Thank god I pushed my changes!

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

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

Unplugging all usb doesnt change anything.

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

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

Booting from a live cd works fine

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

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

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

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

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

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

Any ideas ? 😞

I love linux because i dont have to forced to do frickin update like windows did.
Because i have an experience after update linux mint i cant even start the main GUI program. After boot only show blank console. It seem linux update broke the compatibility between my graphics card.
At least now i dont have to update because thats an option. The output of update is not different than windows.there is a chance you broke your OS.
But the struggle is when i need to install new app in linux. Sometimes need more than hour to find out why it doesnt work from the first time.
Any help here?
So this start from the office. In the office i usually use low spec laptop that work slowly. Then i found this IDE called rapidclipse. Its very promising with GUI builder and can build cross platform mobile app using only java built on top vaadin framework.
When i use it on low spec laptop hackintosh at office it work well although it take more time than other kind of eclipse and i dont need to install any kind of app again, just download-install-create new project-run on tomcat-work well.
Then i go to home to try this new tool , IMO my low spec PC still have more power to run something than old hackintosh. Because usually i use android studio with no problem. In the old hackintosh it went too long to build gradle only.
Then i install rapidclipse, then run desktop shortcut. Then it said i need to install correct java to use correct JavaFX.
After search on SO they said i must install jdk from oracle.
Ok so i got openjdk in my linux.wtf what is the different idk but dont have time to find out.
I install jdk from oracle.
Than finally can open the rapidclipse.
Wow , this gonna be fun.
Then create new project. Just a new project.
So im waiting. I see the progress at 10%. But still no increment on that.
I switch to other app for several minutes.
Then when switched back th app still at 10% and now is at no responding state. So i force close.
After that open rapidclipse again.
The previous new project can be opened. Yay, i think.
But so many error there. Omg.
So i create new project again.
But, but, i just repeated the first error then close again then try it again for several time. But still same output.
After an hour, i give up.
But still, why , just why it work like this. No error or whatsoever.
Back later i have a problem like this on different app.
Idkwhy.

So a few months ago a broke screen of my laptop, currently I quite broke so I can't change screen and for some time I was using TV as screen, but ofc. Windows have to crash or do similar shit and know it doesn't send signal via HDMI, probably it's showing some info, but signal is only send when it boots windows or something.

So my girlfriend give me her old laptop (4gb RAM and I3 processor, bit touchscreen :/) and windows aren't updated for quite a long (it was still windows 8) and I tried to update it. Ofc it has to be problem, DISM doesn't work, downloading iso doesn't work, fml. I guessed I have to live with that, but later disc usage starts to be around 100% and freeze for few minutes (shitty Win2k PC at uni was more responding). Then I try to refresh windows, DISM starts working, updates semi-working. I left with 21 updates with error and there starts conversation:
Me: install 21 updates
Win: kk. Or actually no
Me: please
Win: the best what I could do is 8.
Me: it's something
Win: actually fuck it, only 4
Me: I'm done *typing Manjaro xfce*

So now I have dual boot with Manjaro which use 40% ram with Firefox open, when windows has 30% alone. I can't play anyway and DF is on Linux so fuck Windows.

I am noob when it comes to Linux and everything actually, but it makes me want to learn and improve.