That feeling when you boot up your shiny new laptop for the first time and there's no fucking Cortana, online accounts or mandatory updates right out of the box.

Thank you Dell ❤️

A couple of years ago, I was working in a computer shop as a "technician", I was 15, first job I ever had.
One day an elderly lady came into the shop, probably 50'ish, she and her whole family "suffered" from electromagnetic radiation, and the mother had the worst suffering. She complained about her TV box that just had died.

I accept the tuner and see it's wrapped with 10 layers of aluminium foil, with a tiny hole for the IR receiver.

The whole box smells like burnt electronics, and the foil gets darker for each layer I unwrap. I try explain to her that the box gets warm and overheated by wrapping it like this, and she's lucky that it didn't catch fire.

I further explain to her that she will not get a new box, because the warranty does not cover _this_. The mother tells me she has to wrap it like this, because she gets headaches when she's watching the news.

She then proceeds to go into a rage mode and gets her whole family into the shop, where all of them starts yelling at me, the younger kids start throwing stuff down from the shelves and touching the TVs with sticky fingers (literally, sticky, like yuck!).

Unsure what to do, boss is in a meeting, and my colleague is busy in the back.

So I calmly tell them that in this building there's 4 wireless networks, 3 wireless phones, high voltage cables run in the wall behind me, there's factory tracks 20 meters behind the building, next door business is an electrician, you're standing in front of wall with 30-40 TVs, 5 HDMI splitters, 3 TV boxes and a Blu-ray player. And they've all been standing in front of them for the last 10 minutes.

They all suddenly feel really sick and run out of the store, never to be seen again. From that day, I decided I'll never work in a shop again, and pursued my dreams to become a developer.

TL;DR: Family is "sensitive" to electromagnetic radiation, almost put burnt down their house because of stupidity, yelled at me. I decided to pursue my dream as a developer.

Height of work pressure:

⚠ I was flashing my ID card instead of unlocking the house door with the keys.

⚠Me and my friends went out for dinner in one of the best restaurants and as I finished, I started walking towards the wash basin with plates in my hand.

⚠I don't login to facebook, youtube, etc.. at my personal internet connection at home... thinking it will be blocked anyway. Till I realized that, I was at home.

⚠Once after talking to one of my friends I ended the conversation saying, "Ok bye... in case of any issues will call you back"

⚠Once I went to a pharmacy and asked for a tab. Pharmacist asked whether I want 250mg or 500mg? I replied 256mb. Thank god he didn't notice.

⚠After a hectic week, went to a movie. In the middle of the movie, when I wanted to check the time, I kept repeatedly glancing at the bottom right corner of the Theatre Screen.

😄So avoid working so hard !😄

Have a great work-life balance.

Lastly...

⚠Extreme Work Pressure:
An employee opens his lunch box on the road side to see, whether he is going to office, or coming back from office.😂😂..

Tonight, I had the pleasure of being challenged to make a virus for a VM over at the awesome "virus aquarium": computernewb.com

I present to you the Eevee fork/bomb.
Tonight, was the first night where I've ever sat down and programmed in VBS. I had a lot of fun doing it too. Right now I'm aiming at corrupting taskkill, tskill, and shutdown for good measure. These are a few of the things that my buddy has pulled on me that has made it difficult for me to continue moving forward.

The other part is to create seperate .exe files that would run my the necessary script. Each of these .exe files will be unique such that it's more difficult to shut all of them down at once.

Despite the fact that this thing will quite literally break your computer, it's fun being challenged to think outside of the box. Quite literally. I've always been careful about what things I touched on a PC, but tonight was fun because I was basically unchained and allowed to run rampant.

As a computer geek I think it's good to let out your inner demon and see what havoc one could wreak.

Many, many years ago, Apple had this software you could install which allowed you to take full control of someone else's machine. Well, my mate who was a designer worked in a different office downstairs. I was often in their fixing stupid shit problems. While he was out on lunch, i installed and configured the software on his mac. After lunch I went back upstairs and watched his every move on my mac. He was in adobe inDesign creating some design for a brochure. He was in a text box changing the heading, i seized the opportunity and took control typing in the text box "i am a useless cunt", pissing myself, I then selected the text and increased the size and made it bold... then the phone rang.

Realised this today.

One of the things I love the most about my job is the requirement to be creative and hackish.

Sometimes you just have to debug/fix stuff in the weirdest ways and this requires for me to think out of the box.

Something that's very new for me on this level!

Senior Management: We are severely disappointed in the timeliness of the two apps you built this year. You had budgeted 3 months for one and it took 4 months and the other was budgeted to take 4 months and took 5 months. We understand that we doubled the requirements halfway through and but that doesn’t take away from our need for you to deliver on time. We provided you with two extra devs on the project! We know they were novices and you had to train them from the ground up during the project, that doesn’t matter. The extra resources should have helped you but your lack of leadership ability is what caused them to hold you back. We know our other team with a budget of 6 months took 2 years on their project and was still unsuccessful but that is a different scenario! That was a pre-built 3rd party ERP plugin, way more complicated and nuanced than simply building and deploying something from scratch. Yes we’re aware your projects were the only successful tech projects at the company this year, that’s just luck and coincidence. The next app we need you to build in 6 months, no questions asked. It needs to consolidate and tie together our 3 different ERPs. Everything that we need out of these products that they don’t do out of the box we need you to wire up. We will decide the exact requirements in a month or so, for now just get started. Yes your apps changed the way we do business and allowed us to complete projects smoother than ever before while saving millions of dollars in wasteful and archaic processes that is OLD NEWS. Stop bringing it up. The successes of yesterday are the status quo of today. Don’t expect any new resources either, you clearly can’t handle them. You will now be giving status updates to 3 different managers as a corrective action to your missed deadlines in order to ensure the timeliness of future deliverables.

Dev: …

Worst disturbance while working?

Some of my faves:
- Mgr flying his new $400 drone around the office (hitting walls, ceiling, etc). I mentioned the price because he crashed it a week later (un-repairable kind of crash), so I didn't feel too sorry for his loss.
- Mgr trying out his new blowgun and blowing darts at a cardboard box down/bewtween the cube hallway (where anyone could walk out of at any time). We would hear the "pfffft" and a loud 'Yea!'.
- Mgr would walk by a cube entry-way, fart, and walk away laughing.
- Mgr called me into area and his desk+the floor area around his desk was covered in peanut shells.
Me: "Wow, you got a mess here."
Mgr: "Yea, got tired of trying to hit the trash can. Maintenance will vacuum the office this weekend."
The mess was one thing, but what disturbed me the most was this asshole thinks Maintenance-Jim has nothing better to do than clean up after this so-called adult.

Karma kicked in and an hour later the owner's wife (we're still a family owned company, so he+his wife are on friendly basis with everyone) stopped by to say hi and walked in on the mess.
June: "What do we have here!?"
Mgr: "Oh...um...uh..I was eating a few peanuts and putting the shells in the trash can and accidentally knocked it over. I was on my way to get the vacuum cleaner."
June: "Hmmm...this looks like more than a few. *You* clean it up right now and *never* let me see this again!"
Mgr: "Yes..yes ma'am...right now.."

Whole office heard the exchange and it was frickin' awesome.

Spent nearly a day to get this tiny laptop-tablet to work.

I got myself a second hand Asus T100TAF but Linux compatibility was far to be found. Online resources said I'd be very lucky if I'd even get the touchscreen or the WiFi to work.

I've been installing distro's all day and I finally have a working version!

Lubuntu with Budgie as desktop environment. Touchscreen works out of the box and some random person on the Linux mint forum linked to a github thing. Lost all hope already but this made the fucking WiFi work.

Can dock and undock it and it works great.

Thanks to all open source devs for this!

Coolest thing i've built solo? I think it's my 3D snake multiplayer game.

It all started with a simple 2D snake game to teach programming basics at community college. Then i added a multiplayer mode based on a simple UDP implementation. Then i wondered how it would look ike in 3D and i had the idea to figure out how to implement a 3D engine by myself and i dove into the maths and wrote a simple 3D engine based on a windows forms picture box.
I showed the game to my colleagues and the loved it and we played it a lot.
So i added special mode boosters, and sound and map events and obervermode and observer polls.... you know it.

Here's a little collage of the journey...

To all you devs still wet behind the ears ranting about css - you have no clue just how good you have it.

Most designs used to be table based (table-ception) and to give something a border with round corners or a "drop shadow" you would literally create a table to hold you content with an border of cells containing a background image of a corner / border.

Now you use border-radius or box-shadow as a 1 liner. Stop bitching about centering things and figure out how to hack it like we did.

If you remember this whats your least missed 20th century hack?

Today I've been mocked by a fucking coffee machine.

So I was at a small train station, everything was already closed except for a small coffee machine

Dumb I, for whatever fucking reason, decided it'd be a great idea to get a highly overpriced cup there.

Now, the fucker made me the drink but instead of giving change, it started "shooting" coins in my direction (there was no flap on change box)

As I'm picking up my change, this abomination of a machine performs a cleanup, spitting some shit into my drink

I couldnt drink it obviously .. threw the overprices drink away, bought another one... Got shot with coins again... Whata pain... Just to figure out... There's no more cups 😭😭

It made the drink into the tray...

AaaAaAAAaaaaAAA

Fml

Yes yes another arch Linux thing but holy shit, in just 2 days I've learnt so much!

First time adding a grub entry and it works straight out of the box :-D

“I don’t mind thinking out of the box, as long as there is evidence of any thinking going on inside it.” — Terry Pratchett

In the begining of time, when The Company was small and The Data could fit in some fucking excel sheets, Those Who Came Before implemented some java tool to issue invoices, notify customers and clear received payments.

Then came the Time Of The Great Expanse, when The Company grew to unthinkable levels. Headcount increased with each passing day, and The Data shows that everything was going great!

But when the future seemed bright, came The Stall-Out. The days when The Company could not expand as fast as it did before. And Those Who Came Before left, abandoning their Undocumented Java Tool to its own luck.

Those who came after knew nothing of the inner workings of the Undocumented Java Tool. They knew only that the magical Jar would take a couple fucking excel spreadsheets and spit out reports and send emails like magic.
And those were The Dark Days.

In the darkness, The Data grew to be a monster. Soon a fucking excel spreadsheet could not hold The Data contained any longer. Those Who Came After, fearing the wrath of The Undocumented Java Tool, dared not mess with its code. Instead, they fucking cut away the lowest volume transactions from the fucking input spreadsheet, and left the company to report the unbilled invoices as "surprise losses". Fucking script kiddies, were Those Who Came After.

Then, at The Darkest of Days (literally, Dec 21st), marched into the project The Six Witchers, who fear not the Demon of Refactoring.

This story is still unfolding. Will The Six Witchers manage to unravel the mysteries of The Undocumented Java Tool? Will they be able to reverse engineer the fucking black box, and scale it's magic into a modern application?
Will they decrease revenue forecasting error by at least 2% in a single strike?

Only the future will tell.

When every time your coworker start a new project, they just use the template out of the box including the sass, less and other unused dependencies eventhough they don’t use it

Client called the office in an angry voice complaining about how he could nog see the data in the latest generated excel sheets. Calmy tryimg to figure out what could be the problem. Asked him to send over the file so I could check it. Works perfect on my end. Ask him to open the file again on his computer and tell me what he is seeing. Error message, empty excel file. He starts to me discribing a directory full of files and folders. 15 minutes later I finally figuren out what it is.

The guy had set winzip as default program for excel files. Hoe do these people work behind a PC Evert day. Are they like I hope this magic box with screen and buttond does everything right today.

Many kudos to the guys behind devRant for incrementally adding features that actually work out of the box.

The newest IPhone (Which specwise is good) is more expensive than the newest graphics cards that are coming out... h.o.l.y. s.h.i.t
and you know what? THE BEST MODEL IS 400 BUCKS MORE EXPENSIVE THAN A FUCKING 2080TI!
And you know what?
WHATS UP WITH STORAGE!
you go from 64Gb to 256 and 512 GIGABYTES OF DATA!!
Its like, Midrange storage to a Ton of Storage to HOLY SHIT WHO NEEDS THIS MUCH?!
and you know WHY they are doing this?
Because most of the people will buy the 256 or 512 model GUARANTEED! People behave like this! you dont believe me?
What if you gave a Big Popcorn box for 15 Bucks and the smallest one for 5 bucks, which one would you buy? The smaller one. (Most of the time) and why? because you only have 2 choices! If I gave you 3 choices: 5 for small, 10 for medium and 15 for large?
You wont buy the smallest one, because it doesnt make sense! THATS WHY AND NOW FUCK OFF AND YOU TOO APPLE GO SUCK COCKS OF YOUR FUCKING FANBOYS WHICH WILL PAY MORE!

It's funny how Microsoft's headset works better out-of-the-box on Ubuntu than on Win10...

Best co-worker quitting story?

"T" I've refereed to in previous rants knew he was close to being fired, so he jumped ship. 'T' sent the usual "I'll miss you guys" email to the department, except me (and a few others that didn't fall for his BS and not scared of him). His mistake was he sent the email out a day early (buddy forwarded me the email) and left the stuff (box of pics, books, etc) he planned on taking with him. One item in particular was a new company provided laptop bag, which technically wasn't his to keep (supposed to leave/turn-in any company provided equipment), so I grabbed the bag and hid it.

The next day I heard him slamming drawers (looking for the bag) and a loud cursing. Other devs peeking over the walls asking what's wrong.

Dev1: "Dude, what's up? Whatcha' looking for?"
T: "Nothing...fuck!...damn it...nothing...assholes...fucking assholes!"
Dev2: "Who's the ass? What's wrong?"
Dev3: "Need help looking for something?"
T: "No..no...nothing...I'm fine...making sure I don't forget anything."

'T' never found out who took the bag and I've had that laptop bag underneath my desk ever since.

A few years ago I was browsing Bash.org, and a user posted that he'd physically lost a machine.

A few weeks ago, I'd switched my router out for OPNSense. I figured it was time to start cleaning up my network.

Over the course of tracking down IP addresses and assigning statics to mac addresses, I spotted an IP I didn't recognize.

Being a home network, I'm pretty familiar with everything on the network by IP, so was a little taken aback.

I did some testing, found out that it was a Linux box. Cool.

I can SSH into it. Ok.

Logs show that it's running fine, no CPU/Memory/Harddrive issues. Nice.

So where is it?

Traceroute shows its connected directly to the router... Maybe over an unmanaged switch...

Hostname is "localhost"... That's no help.

I've walked the network 4 times now, and God knows where it is.

I think maybe I'll just leave it alone. If it ain't broke...

Microsoft Office Sharepoint Server.

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

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

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

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

I’m pretty terrible at soldiering and small electronics in general, but I’m kind of okay with how this turned out.

Back story:
That helmet is my sister-in-law’s, she drives a polaris slingshot. (It’s technically a motorcycle here in the US because it has three wheels.) and she hooked up some EL wire to her helmet and the larger black rectangle in the picture is what the battery pack looked like before. (It takes two AA batteries.) and doesn’t have anyway to recharge them natively.

I did some research and found a neat little charging board (TP4056) and got her a small single cell li-ion battery for it. Now it’s not only less than half the length of the original, but it has a rechargeable battery and a charging circuit built in. The battery is 500mAh and lasts about 65-70mins on a charge. Personally, I feel like that’s not a good enough battery life on a charge, but my sis-in-law says that her and her slingshot friends usually only run with the EL lights on for 30 minute stretches at time so they should be able to get two to three uses before needing a recharge. Which btw, only takes about 35-40 minutes from completely dead.

The box looks like shit cause I literally hacked away at the original casing with a pocket knife and then crammed all the pieces back in and hot-glued the casing together. But I took measurements of the final-ish design and will try to find a small electronics box that will be able to house everything internally. (L: 1-3/4” W: 1-1/4” H: 1-1/4”)

I've seen a job vacancy that asks for the following characteristics in a developer:

- extraverted, do'er (as opposed to thinker), out-of-the-box, curious, sees solutions and not problems, structural thinking vs. theoretical thinking, loves change, acts immediately, makes choices under stress, critically questions themselves if things go wrong

What the [censored] kind of programmer is that? Sounds more like a wannabe brogrammer type.

A typical, real programmer is introverted (for he is introspective, detail-minded and is therefore good at inspecting problems and finding solutions for them).

Seeing problems is not a bad thing, it's in fact necessary to be able to identify issues and not act like your typical manager who only wants to rush to solutions. He thinks deeply and theoretically before he takes action. Theory is the foundation of identifying a problem.

What programmer is stress-resistant? It's not normal for the human brain to be able to deal with stress; this is why switch-tasking is so hard.

Question yourself if things go wrong? Perhaps, but this sounds more like trying to shove the blame around.

Since we live in a rigid computer world with rigidly-defined protocols (say, HTTP), it is often useful to think in a conventional way. Out-of-the-box? Sure, if you're being innovative, or sure, as a tangential characteristic.

In my professional opinion, this vacancy reeks of bad corporate culture.. and the biggest alarm bell I find is: "There is free beer!" Err.. yeah. Anyway.

Amdy's story.

Amdy didn't have it easy. He's just a little APU and was already outdated when he was manufactured. But it got even worse! He didn't do anything wrong, but upon assembly, they lasered a different part number on him.

He didn't think much about it, but then they denied him all the goodies his brothers got: a nice printed box, a cooler, a leaflet, and a sticker.

Amdy didn't get any of that and wasn't welcome in the boxed camp. Instead, they stuffed him into a shoddy tray cardboard box with just some ESD foam for the pins.

Amdy was disappointed. That was just not fair! He was capable like his brothers. To add insult to injury, not even the manufacturer wanted to give warranty on the poor ugly duckling. They didn't listen to his complaints and shipped him to an unknown fate.

Then our roads crossed because Amdy was 10 EUR cheaper than the boxed ones at that point. Little Amdy breathed heavily when he finally got out of the mini box and seemed a bit disoriented. Poor little sod, what did they do to you?

Then he spotted the cooler. He had never seen anything like this before, so much better than the coolers his boxed brothers had received! And even top of the line thermal paste!

Amdy decided to be as good and fast a processor as a small Zen+ APU could possibly be. What was that software stuff? Didn't look like Windows. Ooohhh - Amdy rejoiced when he figured out that he was supposed to run Linux!

And that's how a despaired and unhappy APU finally found a life full of goodness.

A motto for programmers who wanna think out of the box:

1. Fuck the system
2. Elevate
3. And fuck the rest 😉

I've told the same story multiple times but the subject of "painfully incompetent co-worker" just comes up so often.

I have one coworker who never really grew out of the mindset of a college student who just took "Intro to Programming". If a problem couldn't be solved with a textbook solution, then he would waste several weeks struggling with it until eventually someone else would pick up the ticket and finish it in a couple days. And if he found a janky workaround for a problem, he'd consider that problem "solved" and never think about it again.

He lasted less than a year before he quit and went off to get a job somewhere else, leaving the rest of our team to comb through his messy code and fix it. Unfortunately, our team is mostly split across multiple projects and our processes were kind of a mess until recently, so his work was a black box of code that had never been reviewed.

I opened the box and found only despair and regret. He was using deprecated features from older versions of the language to work around language bugs that no longer existed. He overused constants to a ridiculous degree (hundreds of constants, all of which are used exactly once in the entire codebase, stored in a single mutable map variable named "values" because why not). He didn't really seem to understand DRY at all. His code threw warnings in the IDE and had weird errors that were difficult to reproduce because there was just a whole pile of race conditions.

I ended up having to take a figurative hacksaw to it, ripping out huge sections of unnecessary crap and modernizing it to use recent language features to get rid of the deprecation warnings and intermittent errors. And then I went through the same process again for every other project he'd touched.

Good riddance.

Fuck strict corporate software policies, just let me WORK (⁠╯⁠°⁠□⁠°⁠）⁠╯⁠︵⁠ ⁠┻⁠━⁠┻

When I came to this new workplace I was given a Windows laptop. And it came with a bunch of pre-installed corporate stuff and policies like automatic mandatory frequent driver and windows updates. Although I prefer linux, I thought, maybe I'll switch later, first let's see how everything works here, since on Windows I had all VPNs, certificates and other corpo stuff pre-configured out of the box. But imagine missing a standup, because of windows update in the morning. Or missing audio, because of drivers update in the middle of the meeting. And make it every week or so. Also, I couldn't not install my portable DAC drivers, because limited access, blah blah fuck me. And many other small things that I vaguely remember by now.
Later corpo decided to add a tracking plugin into a browser and that was it for me. Gladly, corpo policy allows using Linux (they have their own modified Ubuntu version), which has MUCH less of this crap. I mean, it's still somewhat managed by corpo (like I can't get rid of duplicated PPA, lol.. and sometimes I need to wait like 1-2 mins to login to my laptop because of login server timeout), but that's still better...

Linux, home, sweet home, I missed you <3

Also, I dodged the bullet. Win11 upgrade was a funny shit show to watch :D

I've run into my first nVidia driver issues. Ever. ☹

I'm attempting to install the drivers on my shiny new Dell XPS15 8750. It has both an Intel (default) and nVidia graphics card; the Intel works just fine out of the box with Nouveau, with terrible fps. Installing the nVidia drivers causes a conflict with those, and X just displays a black screen. I can still interact via the virtual terminals, but with a 4k display it's kind of annoying.

I'm currently trying to install nvidia-bumblebee and related crap, bur it is not going well.

YAY.... fuck you Belkin!
Just found out my router is vulnerable to CVE-2017-14491.

For all you not following these issues, this one allows the attacker to intercept connections and perform a traffic hijack, or execute arbitrary code with unrestricted privileges as well as access all important and private data stored on the device aka: the devices login/password, the Wi-Fi passwords, and configuration data just by sending malformed DNS packets to the device.

Now this is all well and good, except Belkin haven't released firmware since 2013, which is strange... seeing how the damn thing was "NEW" out of the box in 2016.

Last time i buy a fucking router from these lousy assholes.

I finally fucking did it!

I strapped up, strapped in, strapped on... uh wait what?

I finally made the full dedicated switch to linux on my personal computer. Blew away Windows and installed linux. I was able to get about 95% of the games that I actually play on PC to run under a combo of proton/lutris-wine.

I feel like after working in a (primarily) linux shop for almost 2 years now, I've learned enough to be able to actually troubleshoot if/when something goes wonky. I've been a windows/sysadmin type in my career for about 8 years and only touched small bits of linux here and there or for fun little projects like a retropie setup.

But thanks to this gig I'm working at now, as a devops engineer, I've learned so got'damn much about linux and I've been developing scripts/tools that run on linux I figured I could, or better yet 'should', take the full plunge.

So, I've decided that if there's something I absolutely need on Windows that Linux doesn't support, instead of knee-jerking and going back to Windows, I'm going to just setup a VM of windows and daily drive Linux from now on.

Some gfx tweaks for games were definitely necessary, it's still not quite as plug and play as Windows for games, but the fact that it only took like 1.5 hours to sort out all of my games performance is really impressive. Especially, considering none of these games actually supports linux out of the box and Wine/Proton is being used to get them to work.

Windows 10 had one groundbreaking UI innovation, but no one adopted it and even Windows 11 discareded this revolutionary idea:

BUTTONS NEXT TO EACH OTHER AND AT THE EDGE OF A BOX DON"T NEED AN ADDITIONAL MARGIN

Windows 10 was the first and last OS where I never accidentally clicked right next to the X on a window, in a passive area that had no other purpose so it might as well have belonged to that motherfucking button.

I passionately hate this trend, adopted nowadays by every OS, that everything needs to be rounded, separated from the things around it, and "allowed to breathe". They don't breathe. They're not alive. They're fucking UI elements and the space between them is unused, lost space.

The only interaction a button has with its surroundings is that it pushes other content away to make room for itself and responds to the cursor. It doesn't wiggle, it doesn't grow and shrink, and it ESPECIALLY doesn't fucking breathe. Please, just let me click the motherfucking button.

Relatedly, do you know of a good, preferably bluish dark GTK theme that provides window decorations that stretch the full height of the titlebar and are laid out next to each other at the very end of the bar without gaps?

Inappropriate experience at work? Here is another one:

The IS department manager 'John' bought a blowgun and was shooting at a box down the cubical farm hallway. Only a little annoying to hear him puff on the tube, but then someone walked out their cube and almost got hit.
Dev: "Dammit John! What the hell are you doing?!"
John: "Maybe you should pay the hell attention to where you're going. You heard what I was doing. Don't be a baby, those darts wouldn't have hurt you anyway."

I've attached a pic of what the darts looked like.

I can’t even say what’s wrong with PHP, because— okay. Imagine you have uh, a toolbox. A set of tools. Looks okay, standard stuff in there.

You pull out a screwdriver, and you see it’s one of those weird tri-headed things. Okay, well, that’s not very useful to you, but you guess it comes in handy sometimes.

You pull out the hammer, but to your dismay, it has the claw part on both sides. Still serviceable though, I mean, you can hit nails with the middle of the head holding it sideways.

You pull out the pliers, but they don’t have those serrated surfaces; it’s flat and smooth. That’s less useful, but it still turns bolts well enough, so whatever.

And on you go. Everything in the box is kind of weird and quirky, but maybe not enough to make it completely worthless. And there’s no clear problem with the set as a whole; it still has all the tools.

Now imagine you meet millions of carpenters using this toolbox who tell you “well hey what’s the problem with these tools? They’re all I’ve ever used and they work fine!” And the carpenters show you the houses they’ve built, where every room is a pentagon and the roof is upside-down. And you knock on the front door and it just collapses inwards and they all yell at you for breaking their door.

That’s what’s wrong with PHP.

To this day I can't figure out why people still drink the windows koolaid.

It's less secure, slower, bloatier (is that a word?), Comes with ads, intrudes on privacy, etc. People say it's easier to use than Linux, but 99% of what anyone does happens on a chrome based web browser which is the same on all systems!

When it comes to dev, it boggles the mind that people will virtualize a Linux kernel in Windows to use npm, docker, k8s, pip, composer, git, vim, etc. What is Windows doing for you but making your life more complicated? All your favorite browsers and IDEs work on Linux, and so will your commands out of the box.

Maybe an argument can be made for gaming, but that's a chicken an egg scenario. Games aren't built for Linux because the Linux market is too small to be worth supporting, not that the games won't work on it...

Worst things about being a dev? Boy, this will be a long one!
- Whatever I do, be it hard work or smart work, I feel I am always underpaid.

- Most people who don't know tech feel my job shouldn't take that long. "Oh, a website that should be easy." "Oh, REST services, that's cute!"

- Most people who know a little tech will be like, "Here is the code for this on Google, then why are you charging this much"

- Companies like Microsoft and Apple who are too cool to follow standards.

- Always underpaid!

- The friggin compilers and random environment vars. Sometimes you make no change and the code works on a restart. I mean wtf!

- Having to give/meet deadlines, when we know most of the times things get out of control.

- Having to work for jerks mostly who don't know squat, and can't tell the difference between a CPU and a Wooden box.

- Sometimes I wanna take a break from my laptop(traveling and stuff) , those are the times I get the maximum work load!

- Did I mention we are always underpaid?

- Because of the kind of work I do, finding a girl has been challenging. Where the heck are they!

- We have to stay always updated. Often we deploy something using a framework and the next day we see an update.

- Speaking of updates, I hate having to support for OSes like Microsoft.

- Speaking of OSes, I hate Apple!

- Speaking of Apple, I feel we are underpaid, de javu?
...
How much would you hate me if I wrote "just kidding" ?

Opened up my SSH port to the internet out of curiosity on a useless box.

Wow..... so, so many requests.

!dev

I'm always somewhat pissed off since i don't have a developer job - barely even a tech job. I scan patient charts into pdfs > a server, and that's as complicated as my job description gets. i sit and scan. my computer is (supposed to be) nothing other than a display for managing the scanned charts.

what really killed me though is that one time, we got a new MFC because our old one was, well, obviously broken beyond their patience level. They told me i'd be "Helping".
I got to cut open the box.
whoop dee fucking doo. Tech assist of the century ladies and gents.

That being ine of the worst cases, there's always the times when they talk to their IT guy and never forget to call him an asshole after simply because they don't like it when they don't understand stuff. I've texted him a few times and he's actually very pleasant to talk with and does his job well. just grinds my gears

(and being the IT guy is not available as an alternative. the job is 1. obviously filled, and 2. I installed a word document password bruteforcer, which they in turn told the doctor who told the IT guy and made it sound like i had developed it - of course, this being a pretty professional clinic, he suggested i get fired. so now any hope of me actually doing what I love there is pretty hopelessly out of my reach>

Today a junior dev from the company I'm working at as consultant, suddenly shouted:
😤"why the hell my software behaves differently on every pc here in the office ... But it works on my machine? I'm sure there's something wrong with the OS/Framework"

🤔 let me think for a moment ...
* is it because the whole office keep developing like the ancient romans did?
* is it because that software is such a mess that requires a wizard in order to manually change all the magic configuration strings ?
* is it because every damn developer there has his particular environment and the word "container" reminds you only the show where the people bid for unclaimed shit ?
* is it because the "guru" at your company decided it was a super cool idea to wrap EVERY single external library (that just works out of the box) into some obscure static helper without even a single trace of documentation and clue of what's wrong?

🤗"I don't know... Must be a bug in the OS or framework for sure"

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

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

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

#itSucksToBeOnTheOtherSideOfTheCode :\

Update on my old rant: I started writing type definitions for our project (it's basically a chunk of separate files where you document the objects you use; typed languages have this out of the box, js doesn't and it may become useful depending on the size of the project). Our codebase is reasonably big -not complicated, but big- and I felt like I was losing track of all the properties\objects\usage\comments\whatever. So I iiterally wrote some ts interfaces: properties with name and types, that's it, so you know what you're passing around.
Proposal was denied, I'll have to delete the documentation; "keeping the doc updated is going to require more work".

Me: Ok, but what am I supposed to do when I need to interface with your code? Run the debugger and figure out what the fuck you guys are passing around?
Team leader: Yes 😊

I can’t even say what’s wrong with PHP, because— okay. Imagine you have uh, a toolbox. A set of tools. Looks okay, standard stuff in there.

You pull out a screwdriver, and you see it’s one of those weird tri-headed things. Okay, well, that’s not very useful to you, but you guess it comes in handy sometimes.

You pull out the hammer, but to your dismay, it has the claw part on both sides. Still serviceable though, I mean, you can hit nails with the middle of the head holding it sideways.

You pull out the pliers, but they don’t have those serrated surfaces; it’s flat and smooth. That’s less useful, but it still turns bolts well enough, so whatever.

And on you go. Everything in the box is kind of weird and quirky, but maybe not enough to make it completely worthless. And there’s no clear problem with the set as a whole; it still has all the tools.

Now imagine you meet millions of carpenters using this toolbox who tell you “well hey what’s the problem with these tools? They’re all I’ve ever used and they work fine!” And the carpenters show you the houses they’ve built, where every room is a pentagon and the roof is upside-down. And you knock on the front door and it just collapses inwards and they all yell at you for breaking their door.

That’s what’s wrong with PHP.

Time to do a little bit of shaming:

I'm specialized in e-commerce applications, mostly based on Shopware, a german out-of-the-box online-shop. They essentially claim to be a better Magento. In December of last year I found a critical issue within the code. Products within the shop can be declared as digital wares. In that case the purchase of a product will unlock the possibility to download a designated file.

As a customer you can access your downloads within the account section. Now here's the problem: The query that fetches the unlocked downloads for a customer is hard-capped at 500 rows. So after your 500th purchase, you won't be able to access any further files you paid for. Essentially their developers thought that this limit would never be exceeded anyway and called it a day.

Personally I think this unacceptable. For the merchant this is a potential law-suit in the making. So I took the time to refactor the code and fix the issue. The corresponding pull-request was flagged as scheduled back in December. Since then there have been numerous releases and the issue is still present. Not only do I ask myself why I should ever put in time and effort to fix their code again, but I also can't believe that they just chose to ignore the issue completely. Also mind that this is not just a small or non-profit open-source project. The responsible company behind the software is a stock corporation that claims to be the market leader in Germany.

After a few hours of trying to get Antergos installed on a SD card I decided to give up and try Ubuntu instead as it usually have better out-of-the-box compatibility. And just like that, I've got it up and running on my School computer. (bios locked, can't boot from USB but SD works for some reason).

So, I'm going to run Ubuntu from a 32GB SD Card, should I upgrade to something bigger?

Edit: I survived grub update. Phew..

!rant but help?

I currently have Kali (for labs I'm working on to teach myself the things I didn't learn in school), Ubuntu (downloaded for school), and Fedora (downloaded for my database class)... other than Kali already having Metasploit in it, I don't see a difference between these and I know there are more versions of Linux.

What would be a good starting place for every day use, that'll support Citrix receiver (required for work no idea what its requirements are but I can find out, if i can't use it in Linux, I'll dual boot) and virtual box (or other virtual software, don't mind learning new systems), and that i can also have room to grow for security learning?

*The Fearless Leader*

I get a call to check up on a robot that has been exceeding weight limits at certain points of its movement (Crashing). As I get to the pendant (robo-game controller thingy I like to call it) and look over the alerts and warnings I notice some oil around the main power box of the Robot.... Nothing around this has oil.. so I start looking around and it turns out that the issue wasn’t a crash at all! It was an oily shorted out wire that kept sparking mad heavy when that servo was called on.. causing a large servo failure that required a full restart of the power box. I called our fearless leader and showed him only to find out that there was a motor leaking oil from the electrical end... My fearless leader runs both the Maintenance and Robotics department. When the motor was eventually fixed we overheard the technicians say that our fearless leader knew about this a week ago and decided to leave it that way.... with oil... coming out of an electrical cable..... *sigh* well Anyway after all the wires were fixed and motors changed. He comes up to me and says that he can’t believe that I didn’t call maintenance and fill a report on negligence of technicians for failing preventative maintenance....

I lost my cool a little, firstly that’s not my job, I’m literally one of the lowest ranking here. I called my next in command to figure out what I should do. Secondly the technicians told me that you told them to leave it like that! So if this place caught on fire this would have been on you!

Later I found out that he was trying to fire a technician and wanted me to do the dirty work.. I’m not going to be the reason another man loses the means for him to feed his family. The technician is a pretty cool and fair guy too!

Our fearless leader was a forklift driver and has no experience in robotics or maintenance... I don’t know how this happens or even why but all I know is this man is running both departments to the ground and management loves him.....

So I was hanging out with a pharmacy student, and they had a box full of over the counter medicine. The box had something for almost anything common; cold, allergies, and so on.

So my question is, do you guys have something like this but with technology? Like a box full of random computer stuff (cables, parts, USB drives, and so on)?

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

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

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

Probably written by an intern.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

OBS is advertised as the expert's screen recording and streaming tool, every list on the internet makes it out to be some incredibly difficult program not recommended for newbies.

It's also the only linux screen recorder that works out of the box on Pipewire, records both microphone and system sounds and all configuration was to
1. select recording as my main use case in the setup wizard which is a very verbose English popup, then accept all defaults
2. add a new source, following the instructions written in the box which are also the only instructions on screen after application launch
3. set the output directory (optional) by going to File > Settings > Output > Recording Path, all of which were the first items I guessed. If I had not done this, it would've written everything to my home folder which is a bit dumb but not confusing at all
4. click Start Recording
5. click Stop Recording when done

Some newbie-oriented screen recorders have a more complicated setup procedure than this super advanced experts' tool don't touch without safety gloves and a degree in video engineering.

Our CEO had a virtual town hall using Zoom and now have a sign language interpreter box as a regular feature... To go along with all the Inclusion stuff...

The most immediate problem though is they didn't turn on auto-captions...

I don't know sign but am deaf so needed the captions which it turns out you can get using the Google Recorder app on Pixels. (This is literally like a fuck you to non-Pixel users and Zoom which disables Live Captions in conferences and recording full transcripts).

Anyway I left it own and near the end, a speaker was like "we're getting a lot of likes and positive feedback about the interpreter box! See how small changes make such a big difference?!"

And well of course in my mind I'm going "uh.... No."

I'll just go back to not caring about anything that isn't related to how much I make.

In sweden, probably in many countries, we have this chocolate calendar where u get one piece of chocolate every day til Christmas. This is usually for kids but we "younger ones" got one from a colleague as fun gift. After about half through December when I came back on Monday i realized that someone had emptied my chocolate box and had thrown it in the trash. I was devastated. So I wrote an angry email, ending with "Merry fucking shit christmas", to the whole office in order to make the guilty one feel more guilty.
As it turned out, another colleague had found an exact same box, emptied that one and replaced mine. He came crawling 2min after I sent the mail😂

Create a new project in Xcode Version 10.1 (10B61) - Single View iOS app.

Drag a button on to the screen. It shows in InterfaceBuilder

Launch app in simulator. Button shows, then disappears. Noob says WTF?!

Poor noob has to ask me why this is happening and I explain that Apple's Single View project is a single splash screen project. The button they placed on what they thought was the single "window" is really a splash screen named "LaunchScreen".

Apple Xcode team (aka fucktards) provide yet another shitty out of the box experience...

It is so hard to be positive when teaching others how to use Xcode. Thanks for DevRant for letting me vent.

you motherfucking cocksucking ass wipes.

How fucking hard is it for you JS cockheads to have STABLE fucking code?

So hear I am, thinking through a side project for data extraction and loading to automate some shitty part of my job, that could be used by the broader team... and decide to use electron.... I know it's a clusterfuck, but this wouldn't be a big application, so against my better judgement I run:

npm install electron
npm start
...
Error: unknown spawn

🤷‍♂️ you had 1 fucking job... 1 fucking lousy shit stain of a job, and you can't even have something run out of the god foresaken box without someone debugging your shit.

Now who has a WORKING alternative to electron?

Primarily IntelliJ IDEs.

I'm using IDEA for Rust & Kotlin, PHPStorm, Datagrip (DB), and sometimes PyCharm CE.

IDEs can feel a bit dirty with how heavy they are, and the lack of customization/control. But at the end of the day there's just nothing that can measure up against IntelliJ's inspections, integrations and project indexing.

My ideal product would be one universal IntelliJ IDE, but combined with the openness of VSCode/Atom, having everything transparently configurable through stylesheets and scripts.

As an editor though.... I use Vim for LaTeX, Markdown, plain text and Haskell code... but not so much for other programming languages.

Vim was my first editor when I moved from C64 to PC development 25 years ago, and while you get used to balancing keybind vimgolfing with being actually productive, i've always found maintaining plugins and profiles too cumbersome -- the reality is that Vim is an awesome TEXT editor, but it's really awful as a CODE editor out of the box.

When you want to try out a new programming language, you don't want to have to mess around with your Vimrc and Vundle and YCM for half a day just so you can comfortably write "Hello World" in Rust or Elixir... you just want to click one install button, press F10 to compile and see if it flies.

Oh, and I use Xed a lot for quickly editing files... because it's the default GUI editor on Mint desktops, and it's quite good at being a basic notepad.

Noticed a new version of our primary customer management application was deployed to my machine. Its been a while since I've seen it, so I decide to see all the 'improvements' over the 'old' one (~18 year old app written in Delphi).

Wow, it's slow, several seconds to open. Tried to open my account..really, really slow.

Notice a lonely edit box with no label, and button right next to it with no caption, so I click it and get the attached error.

Tried to place an order, I must have done something 'out of sequence' because I clicked another button and the whole app crashed.

In less than 5 minutes I found a dozen or so UX failures. I suck pretty bad at UI, but good lord...what the frack happened to basic usability.

Today in development: discovered that it's possible via combination of keys to rename a database in SQL Server Management Studio without as much as a dialog box to confirm.

Shout out to the 2000ish users in production that discovered this delightful nugget of info with me.

Lessons learned:

A) Don't trust Microsoft to create software that makes you confirm potentially catastrophic actions

B) Make sure your user hasn't been granted ALTER DATABASE permissions without your knowledge before you start using it.

It kills me that a lot of people on here choose Linux distros based solely on desktop environments. Its Linux guys, you can make it whatever you want. You should decide between distros because of package managers or frequent updates or active communities, not because of how pretty it is out of the box. You can make it as pretty as you want.

Oh for crying out loud. Master/Slave has been the defacto way to describe dependent interactions between electronics since the birth of the silicon chip. Even IDE used to implement it as a standard for running multiple devices over a single cable. Just because a handful of fresh faced 18 year old kids think the world owes them a soap box and a rock to hang themselves over, it does not mean the world has to bend to this oversaturated retribution complex that seems to be affecting every college student lately. Grow the fuck up.

I'm a python fanboy, not gonna lie.
I love everything about it. It's clean syntax, ready to use out of the box-ness, convenient built-in functions.

The one thing I hate is the official documentation. It's ugly, hard to navigate and a cluster fuck.

But it has proper information, so it's fine I guess. tsch

I get it, Java is an old language that's verbose as the day is long. But damn, please don't make it *even more verbose* than it needs to be. We've got the tools now to make it at least somewhat tolerable.

I mean, come on, we've got lombok, we've got streams, and we've had Comparator.comparing since Java 8. That's the best part of a decade you've had the luxury of writing single line comparator implementations out the box, but noooo, certain people have to pretend they're stuck in the 90's by thinking these multiple if / else statements are somehow still the best way of doing things.

Dahhh. Skill up people. This is not an industry where you can just do everything how you did it 20 years ago and call it good.

So. I was pretty sure I had fixed the problem we had with compiling in Windows 10. Thing is I did it in a stopgap non-permanent way because we have to be done with it by the second week of February to support our subcontractor.
Turns out I had an older version of the framework we build on installed on my box and the newer version decided to fix their windows 10 compilation issues the right way. So we can't use our stopgap solution. So basically I look like an idiot and more important people than me have to work on the problem because I am not allowed to install anything on my box myself, our SA is already overwhelmed, and only the higher ups have the newest framework version. Good thing it's a long weekend and I have plenty of of beer and whiskey.

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

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

Wtf.. mind blown

If hiring managers really want to hire based on skill, what they should be doing is testing for one thing:

The ability to take a specification, written in general language, notice deficiency, communicate with the 'client' (manager) to hash out what needs done, and the (explicit) ability to read documentation on libraries or tooling outside the dev's core skillset.

If a dev can read a spec, talk to a client to work out whats lacking, and then identify what they need to know and where to find it, thats 90% of the skills they need from what I can see.

tl;dr version of it, is they should be explicit about the requirements for reading/implementing specs and finding the correct documentation.
Something along the lines of
"can you form your letters? Are you able to follow instructions on the back of a cake box? Then there may be a position waiting for you!"

So recently I started to observe a little upgrade in the Google's searching algorithm. The next suggestion in Google's search box is depending more on my immediate preceding search. It's so good that its starting to creep the hell out of me.

The latest Ubuntu 17.10 patch let's VMware run out of the box!

Woo!!!!
Finnaly time to migrate! :-D

- - Hey buddy, can you create a simple App for me to publish on the Play store?
- let me see first what features you need
- - **Spending 20 minutes talking about so many features and out of the box design**
- that's it?
- - yes that is it, it's​very simple I know it !
- so you think it's​ simple huh? so fo it yourself !...

Most successful? Well, this one kinda is...

So I just started working at the company and my manager has a project for me. There are almost no requirements except:
- I want a wireless device that I can put in a box
- I want to be able to know where that device is with enough accuracy to be able to determine in which box the device was put in if multiple boxes were standing together

So, I had to make a real time localization system. RTLS.
A solo project.

Ok, first a lot of experiments. What will the localization technique be? Which radio are we going to use?
How will the communication be structured?

After about two months I had tested a lot, but hadn't found THE solution. So I convinced my manager to try out UWB radio with Time Difference Of Arrival as localization technique. This couldn't be thrown together quickly because it needed more setup.

Two months later I had a working proof of concept. It had a lot of problems because we needed to distribute a clock signal because the radio listeners needed to be sub-nanosecond synchronous to achieve the accuracy my manager wanted. That clock signal wasn't great we later found out.

The results were good enough to continue to work on a prototype.
This time all wired communication would be over ethernet and we'd use PTP to synchronize the time.

Lockdown started.

There was a lot of trouble with getting the radio chip to work on the prototype, ethernet was tricky and the PTP turned out to be not accurate enough. A lot of dev work went into getting everything right.

A year and 5 hardware revisions later I had something that worked pretty well!
All time synchronization was done hybridly on the anchors and server where the best path to the time master was dynamically found.

Everything was synchronized to the subnanosecond. In my bedroom where I had my test setup I achieved an accuracy of about 30cm in 3d. This was awesome!

It was time to order the actual prototype and start testing it for real in one of the factory halls.

The order was made for 40 anchors and an appointment was made for the installation in the hall.

Suddenly my manager is fired.

Oh...
Ehh... That sucks. Well, let's just continue.

The hardware arrives and I prepare everything. Everything is ready and I'm pretty nervous. I've put all my expertise in this project. This is gonna make my career at this company.

Two weeks before the installation was to take place, not even a month after my manager was fired, I hear that my project was shelved.

...
...

Fuck

"We're not prioritizing this project right now" they said.

...

It would've been so great! And they took it away.
Including my salary and hardware dev cost, this project so far has cost them over €120k and they just shelved it.

I was put on other projects and they did try to find me something that suited me.

But I felt so betrayed and the projects we're not to my liking, so after another 2-3 months I quit and went to my current job.

It would've so nice and they ruined it.
Everything was made with Rust. Tags, anchors, RTLS server, web server & web frontend.

So yeah, sorry for the rambling.

Need some advice -

I have over one month spare time before joining the company. I have always wanted to learn an instrument but I'm also 'thinking' of joining a gym but I don't have any fantasies for big biceps and I am a big time foodie.

I have read that learning new instruments would help you in critical and out of the box thinking which is a definite plus while programming. While joining a gym would be a good way to keep myself fit in this hectic world of programming.

I'm torn in choosing between these two options. Which one should I join as a developer? What would my fellow devs suggest? 🤔

jQuery. jQuery everywhere.

People's dependency on this library would be like everybody carrying a tool chest with them, even for basic jobs like re-arranging a stack of books or collecting leaves in the yard. Cmon y'all, JS does a lot of this out of the box without the bloated library.

But then again, I'm addicted to MOMENTJS, so I should probably shut up now. 😆😄😬

Pulled into an 'emergency' meeting with a group of web designers deeply concerned a particular service wasn't going to meet all their requirements.
DevA: "For each page, Its going to be A LOT of work to retrieve all the data and store it's state. Every page load will require a round trip to the service."
DevB: "Yes, we aren't sure how the service should be changed to do what we need."
Mgr: "What is it not doing now? Doesn't the service already returns all the necessary data?"
DevA: "Well...um...its all the boolean fields. Some may be defaulted from the database or false because the user unchecked the box. We have to know which is which"
Me: "Why? Are you doing anything different in the UI? Checkbox will be true or false. What or who set that value is irrelevant"
DevC: "Well, it matters if the user didn't fill out all other other values."
Me: "How so?"
DevA: "Its matters because the values in the other fields. Its going to be A TON of work to figure out."
<mgr goes to the white board>
Mgr: "Lets map this out...what fields are you needing to trigger the state on?"
DevA: "Um...uh...the 'Approved' field...and um...'OK to Contact' field"
Mgr: "Just those two?"
DevA: "Yea..um...there are other fields, but whether or not to show the edit box depends on those two."
Me: "The service already returns data, you only have two fields to check? I don't see a need to change the service at all."
DevA: "Returning all that data, we are going have a serious scaling problem. We'll be hitting the service A LOT. All that javascript could cause performance problems too"
Me: "How much data are we talking about? Name, address, couple of booleans?"
DevA: "I have to serialize the data. All that logic is going to be reeeaaallly complicated. It might be better if the service returned only the data I need."
Me: "$64,000 question, how often is this feature going to be used on the web site? Maybe once? Few hundred a week?"
Mgr: "We have no idea. A lot of the data will be pre-populated and we're only sending out a few thousand invitations. More around the holidays...but honestly, not very many."
Me: "Changing that service only for this particular area of the web site isn't going to happen. Changing the UI is the only course of action."
DevA: "Oh frack I can't wait until this project is over."

DevA...how the funck do still have a job here? You wasted about half-hour of my time with your cry-baby crap. Where is my hammer...no...no..don't go there...ahhh...thanks devrant. Prison sentence diverted.

Could not fucking sleep at all.

Spent the entire night in a combination of:

Weight lifting
Playing with NestJS(its fucking beautiful)
Watching seven deadly sins on Netflix(current fav anime)

And i am still not tired. Even then I am not in the mood for going to work.
Not sure if I want to risk it and drive there since I know I will be crashing at around noon.

I hate it when this happens.

During the week I would do crazy shit to try and get me to fall asleep.

I would wake up early. Work out, go to work, get back from work, kill myself at the gym and nope.

Still wide fucking awake.

To make it better, my stomach begins to act up and fucking kill me the more I don't sleep for some reason(although it could be related to me piercing my stomach years ago)

I really dislike being human. Such fragile bodies.

But yeah, NestJS is frickin amazing. Typescript is sexy as all hell with it. Just what i was looking for in terms of out of the box architecture for JS apps

At the institute I did my PhD everyone had to take some role apart from research to keep the infrastructure running. My part was admin for the Linux workstations and supporting the admin of the calculation cluster we had (about 11 machines with 8 cores each... hot shit at the time).

At some point the university had some euros of budget left that had to be spent so the institute decided to buy a shiny new NAS system for the cluster.

I wasn't really involved with the stuff, I was just the replacement admin so everything was handled by the main admin.

A few months on and the cluster starts behaving ... weird. Huge CPU loads, lots of network traffic. No one really knows what's going on. At some point I discover a process on one of the compute nodes that apparently receives commands from an IRC server in the UK... OK code red, we've been hacked.

First thing we needed to find out was how they had broken in, so we looked at the logs of the compute nodes. There was nothing obvious, but the fact that each compute node had its own public IP address and was reachable from all over the world certainly didn't help.
A few hours of poking around not really knowing what I'm looking for, I resort to a TCPDUMP to find whether there is any actor on the network that I might have overlooked. And indeed I found an IP adress that I couldn't match with any of the machines.

Long story short: It was the new NAS box. Our main admin didn't care about the new box, because it was set up by an external company. The guy from the external company didn't care, because he thought he was working on a compute cluster that is sealed off behind some uber-restrictive firewall.

So our shiny new NAS system, filled to the brink with confidential research data, (and also as it turns out a lot of login credentials) was sitting there with its quaint little default config and a DHCP-assigned public IP adress, waiting for the next best rookie hacker to try U:admin/P:admin to take it over.

Looking back this could have gotten a lot worse and we were extremely lucky that these guys either didn't know what they had there or didn't care.

Is there any other software more fucking bloated than Skype? Fuck you Skype, for constantly freezing everytime I start chatting, making me take my precious hands off my precious keyboard and use the fucking...... __mouse__ to fucking click into the text box, THEN start chatting. EVERY FUCKING TIME. Whoever is working on that team, please get your head out of your ass and fix the laggy bullshit you've created. Thank you.

Hey dear HR people and Headhunters - learn to write proper Joboffers - when someone is a JavaScript developer and even writes JavaScript for 10 years for a living doesnt mean he can or wants to write strict typed TypeScript out of the box using an library ecosystem and NOT a framework already written with TypeScript (React vs Angular)

Write TypeScript developers in the job offers when you search them: TypeScript !== JavaScript.

Once I was pairing with a colleague on his box. His setup is three screens; two large monitors and his MacBook. On the Mac, he has a messaging service that syncs his texts. Unbeknownst to him, his wife sends some dirty pictures to him. I don't know how long they were there, but once I saw them I politely tried to ignore them with no avail. I lost my train of thought and just laughed. He figured out the issue and quickly closed the chat. He was cool about it, saying our build times wouldn't feel nearly as long if he left it open.

Pair programming gone wrong? More like "gone right".

Windows restrict us from going out of the box (house), and allow us to see the world only through the window, sitting in.

Decided to install new CentOS to prepare for Red Hat exams.
a) had to disable VirtualBox Audio and USB otherwise it got stuck during boot (lvm2 masking did not help)
b) First command - "dnf update". Crashed in middle of the process and completely screwed dnf/yum (TWICE!). Went through just fine when executed from runlevel 3.

So far it held up to the name Enterprise Linux because this is the exact out of box clusterfuck I would expect from a corporate.

MacBook/OSX

Have used all kinds of OSes and computers. Nothing sucked the productivity out of me as much a company provided MacBook. Some issues were related to the company setup (vpn issues after sleep, jamf botched app installs). But most of the day to day work was just due to crappy key handling. Lots of shortcuts that work everywhere don't (think all the alt combos in terminal). Common things require combos and using the actual keys (like home and end) on an external keyboard have undefined behaviour. Out of the box it does not even have decent window management, this means that a third party tool has to provide the shortcuts and they clash with a few programs.

Thank god I can use Linux now to develop for Linux.

I hate hate hate React! Sorry but to me it's just such a bloated pos of a framework. I realize it was pretty revolutionary at first, the idea of having everything "reactive" and all of that - but newer things like Svelte.js are a dream to work with, whereas trudging through the poorly coded React app I'm supposed to be testing for work is making me want to pull my hair out! I installed a vscode tool so everybody could see what the import "cost" is on everything - a simple INPUT is 50KB of pure BLOAT for something that should and can be way simpler.

I realize there are probably better coded apps out there that wouldn't drive me so crazy, but anybody importing hundreds of KB of 3rd party crap just to get a select box, some inputs, and a date picker are really out of their mind.

!dev

I'm checking out at Walgreens right now and have an item with a security device on it. The cashier just took a pair of scissors to it. Didn't work obviously and now I think she's trying to rip the cords off the box

"We need to support IE8 out of the box"

WHY IS IT SO FUCKIN ABSURDLY HARD TO PUSH BITS/BYTES/ASM ONTO PROCESSOR?

I have bytes that I want ran on the processor. I should:
1. write the bytes to a file
2a. run a single command (starting virtual machine (that installed with no problems (and is somewhat usable out-of-the-box))) that would execute them, OR
2b. run a command that would image those bytes onto (bootable) persistent storage
3b. restart and boot from that storage

But nooo, that's too sensible, too straightforward. Instead I need to write those bytes as a parameter into a c function of "writebytes" or whatever, wrap that function into an actual program, compile the program with gcc, link the program with whatever, whatever the program, build the program, somehow it goes through some NASM/MASM "utilities" too, image the built files into one image, re-image them into hdd image, and WHO THE FUCK KNOWS WHAT ELSE.

I just want... an emulator? probably. something. something which out of the box works in a way that I provide file with bytes, and it just starts executing them in the same way as an empty processor starts executing stuff.

What's so fuckin hard about it? I want the iron here, and I want a byte funnel into that iron, and I want that iron to run the bytes i put into the fuckin funnel.

Fuckin millions of indirection layers. Fuck off. Give me an iron, or a sensible emulation of that iron, and give me the byte funnel, and FUCK THE FUCK AWAY AND LET ME PLAY AROUND.

I used to be in an infrastructure maintenance team, and I worked with an old guy. We had a jump box we all used. This guy would work weekend maintenance windows and still be trying to get changes done at 7am, three hours after the end of the window. He was glacially slow. I remember watching him login to a prod weblogic server. He would open the Windows start menu, move his fucking mouse through two or three submenus, and finally click putty. Then, he would type out the FQDN of the jump server, and move his mouse to the connect/ok button. Then it would prompt him for his username and password, both of which took him about 90 seconds to single-finger type. Then, once loved into the jump box, he would then type ssh user@server.fqdn, rather than copying and pasting the server name.

It took him fully five minutes to get logged into the weblogic server. I could not take it. It would have taken me about ten seconds.

So our junior dev constantly asks really obvious things. But this one question really takes the cake.
So we have a small programm that opens a file browser and puts the selected files path in a line edit text box. So he comes over to me and says its broken because he cant edit the path in the text box. Weird, this shouldnt happen at all. Turns out this more than braindead tortoise thought it was just a regular piece of uneditable text and didnt even try to edit it. Its a FUCKING OBVOIUS EDITABLE TEXTBOX!!!!!
I facepalmed so hard that moment you could hear the slap half a mile away!

WTF do y’all mean when you say it just works “out-of-the-box”.

What’s one Tech buzzword or phrase that in your opinion, shouldn’t exist?

"This question is unlikely to help any future visitors"

For all the people that answer anyway or answer before this happens, thank you.

To the assholes who do this at SO: I can't tell you how many specific problems I've had where a question that did help me had this.

You all suck. Go fuck yourself off a cliff. The entire site is built on the backs of people who get shat on by a small elitist community that likely couldn't code themselves out of a box.

Again, to those who still answer... thank you. To those who still ask questions in spite of the abuse... thank you.

I received a computer to work on for work and needed a knife to open the box. That's when my coworker pulled out this nugget of wisdom:

Coworker: My knife has a knife on it.
Me: Really?! Who would've thought?

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.

The other day the department reorganized our entire work area. Couple of developers wanted standing desks (which was denied because the powers-that-be doesn't know what 'standing desks' means..
but that is another rant).
VP wanted two more desks in our area, but short by only a couple of feet (so only one desk would fit, not a big deal)

DevA: "You know, if we had standing desks, we could move closer together by at least a couple of feet. Might be a little cramped, but at least we'd all be happy."
Me: "Who the -bleep- are these 'all' people? If you want to stand, then stand up, get a box for your keyboard/mouse and raise your monitor. You don't speak for me."

And DevA is pushing 300lbs, drinks soda all day, eats out of the vending machine most of the day, etc...standing desk? What for 3 minutes before I have to listen to
"Oh...my back..oh...my ankles...I hate this place for forcing me to use a standing desk!"

I run 5K every morning, lift weights, run over lunch, etc...when I'm at work, I'm ready to sit down!

Legit Apple Interview
There are three boxes, one contains only apples, one contains only oranges, and one contains both apples and oranges. The boxes have been incorrectly labeled such that no label identifies the actual contents of the box it labels. Opening just one box, and without looking in the box, you take out one piece of fruit. By looking at the fruit, how can you immediately label all of the boxes correctly?
Those who got it answer it directly on Saturday/Sunday until then good luck

It's so nice when kindness is retributed...
When on a flash shopping for wood, to fix my chair. Found out that the shop was way cheaper than a big chain I went a few days ago... Like up to 2/3 and 3/4 cheaper... Well, spent 1-hour shopping in such a small shop.
Meanwhile, started talking, telling what I'm doing with the wood and the tools... and eventually asked if she had any leftovers because I would use them.
A little more shopping, a little more talk and she asked, what will you do with the leftovers??
I've started talking about my new hobby, then the why I started this hobby (burn out), and that I'm making machines and tools with the stuff I'm buying...
Left with a big box full of leftovers, even a catalog with fine wood, all the same size...
It's nice when people reward kindness with kindness.
Also, gained a new costumer, never shopping anywhere else again if they have it.

how soon will it be before someone develops an out of the box packet sniffer for those wireless apple headphones

I've every been a Arch Linux fag. It's my main OS from 5 years. With a small parenthesis of two months of FreeBSD recently, I've used before Arch Kubuntu, Ubuntu, Fedora KDE, OpenSolaris (randomly), CentOs, plus a lot of others distro for tests.
But I've never tested Debian!
So I've installed it on my small server.

Oh... My... God.... It's fantastic. PACMAN >>> apt, but damn it's really stable and out of the box even if minimal. A very surprise. I think it can be my favorite remote Linux for a long time....

But a question rises. Why with a father like Debian... Ubuntu after the 11.04 is such a shame? The last I've tested is the 12.04 I think, but I've hated it, and I hate it even now. (Crash, driver not found, apt problem, very heavy repos and my internet sucks, UNITY, etc...)

Ubuntu, what happened to you ...? With Kubuntu 8 you were such a good guy...

Got that old mid 2011 MBA and just put Ubuntu 20.04 on it. Tried 18 on it before but didn't really feel right. 20 works great though.

I love it when I can reuse old hardware I have laying around and it works out of the box.😁

Will use it for entertainment purposes, movies, music etc.

I'm looking for a distro that is more modern than Ubuntu 16.04, not the shithole that Ubuntu 17.10 is and works, practically, out of the box with my xps 9560.

this 17.10 update thing is driving me nuts. the plot twist is.. if I don't get it set up before tomorrow I'll just switch to windows.

Just realized that after 3 months of continuous samsung s9 use my phone is still as fast as it was when i got it out the box.

Man I love this stupid phone so much. Everything opens up so fast and this sob is as smooth as an iphone when it comes to the speed.

Pure goodness. Still would like to try a more pure Android environment u know? Like back when nexus was still a thing. I don't really dig the pixel phones too much but know that I am on a more open carrier and I can use phones like the one plus series I think i know what my next phone would be.

Nothing personal samsung, you have been good ans loyal, but i want to play with more phones.

I really love smartphones.

On a previous job, my coworkers were jealous because I started going out for lunch some days of the week instead of staying with them at the office kitchen. So every time I went out, I came back to find some kind of small prank, and also a sign reading "Lunch Break Maffia Attacks Again". Once they made garlands by glueing/taping together a lot of sauce packets (mayonnaise, ketchup, and so on) in different patterns and decorated my whole box with them.

So I have a pet peeve to talk about here, I'm excited for the Atari box as I have some inside information that is officially confirmed about it (unfortunately am not allowed to talk about it :-C) and I see people out there saying it is "an underpowered Linux steam machine)...

How the fuck are people coming to this conclusion when the specs, OS or anything technical about it haven't even been released yet?!

Why must people immediately assume that because it's not a standard windows PC it must be a piece of shit?

Boggles my mind that so many people can be so defensive and go on the offence without knowing anything.

Just so I can clarify, I'm a console gamer, Linux lover yet still develop for windows and the like so this isn't a biased rant and I know people will look at this, see the word Linux and go on the attack... So... Just... Chill?

You gotta know the box to think out of the box, said the Dropbox fanatic while syncing his local Git folders to share with the team.

So apparently vmware has a blacklist of video drivers... if you want to ignore the blacklist you legit have to manually add a line to the .vmx file...

I understand it's not a massive problem everyone will have but at least add a GUI option...

Fuck me, if your going to have something that can potentially render your product useless to some users out of the box, at least give them a simple way, even if it is just under he VM's advanced options -.-

For the people working on small startups:

How do you keep updated on best practices, engineering, and all that when you're 24/7 focused on the startup (implementing, testing, fixing stuff)?

I feel like I love doing things the best way, but we always go with the "do fast, break fast" and it always feels like a mess because the engineering is done after a really small MVP is done (and after a long time usually).

I was hoping to be able to at least do a really small engineering part *before* starting anything new, but CEO always wants stuff done *yesterday*. But for this I think I should be reading more, and playing around with new patterns and all that, so at least I know out of the box what would be a good thing to start with and not having to change the entire project/script from scratch.

Ordered some fucking computer glasses (which filter out the blue light). Been having red eyes and excessive fatigue these last months, plus sneaky headaches.

We're in 2018, and fucking delivery companies still think that people are at home waiting for their parcel. They came yesterday, fucking saw I wasn't there, they left a fucking delivery notice when my parcel does not require a signature!! I mean, what's the use of a P.O box if it's only there to host spiders in summer?

Plus on that stupid delivery note they've put a QR code - "please use the given code or scan this QR code to change your delivery options" - which is unreadable, AND they didn't give me the fucking code.

Be flexible for fuck's sake, and evolve with your time. I hate Slowtzerland for that - conservative, late, immuable. Especially in "social" services. 99% of the population is away from home from 6 to 18, time to fucking print that in your brain and get on with it.

Now I might wait until Saturday so I can get them glasses...

A large update on UI rolls out, after around 10 rounds of public testing. Waves of complaints finally arrive.
Complaint 1: I liked the old plaintext UI because the UI now has some markdown
Complaint 2: I wish the tabs weren't multiline but I don't want to reduce the number of tabs nor sacrifice the accessibility by making it scrollable or something
Complaint 3: Why did you make boxes we did it fine with a single box filled with plaintext
Complaint 4: The lag is gone but I liked the old laggy UI because it was there for years

Me: dafuq?

PS: dev lead is happy with the results so things are okay at least for now

For all the hate that Java gets, this *not rant* is to appreciate the Spring Boot/Cloud & Netty for without them I would not be half as productive as I am at my job.

Just to highlight a few of these life savers:
- Spring security: many features but I will just mention robust authorization out of the box
- Netflix Feign & Hystrix: easy circuit breaking & fallback pattern.
- Spring Data: consistent data access patterns & out of the box functionality regardless of the data source: eg relational & document dbs, redis etc with managed offerings integrations as well. The abstraction here is something to marvel at.
- Spring Boot Actuator: Out of the box health checks that check all integrations: Db, Redis, Mail,Disk, RabbitMQ etc which are crucial for Kubernetes readiness/liveness health checks.
- Spring Cloud Stream: Another abstraction for the messaging layer that decouples application logic from the binder ie could be kafka, rabbitmq etc
- SpringFox Swagger - Fantastic swagger documentation integration that allows always up to date API docs via annotations that can be converted to a swagger.yml if need be.
- Last but not least - Netty: Implementing secure non-blocking network applications is not trivial. This framework has made it easier for us to implement a protocol server on top of UDP using Java & all the support that comes with Spring.

For these & many more am grateful for Java & the big big community of devs that love & support it.

I made my passion my job, programming servers & web dev. Although it has been productive economically it has sucked the fun out of programming servers for me...so as a way to rediscover my passion I'm giving game dev a try. After a couple of weekends playing with a game engine this is what I've got, a monkey dev with a suit that jumps from project cabinet to project cabinet avoiding hazards, drinking coffee and trying to make some money (someone told me I should express myself and I took that personally).

I'm pretty much done but the hazard placeholders (a box and an arrow) don't convince me so I wanted to see if my fellow disenfranchised developers had some ideas of what my developer should be avoiding/being hit by, preferably something I could draw easily since as you can see I'm not much of an artist although I've also though of just words falling like "deadline" or something.

Anyway any feedback is welcome, take it ez I've never drawn anything more than a stickman and this is my first attempt at something playable. Small Rant plus question. Happy Monday.

Since I've started writing in clojurescript a 1.5 yrs ago, I can barely look at JavaScript.
I started to realise how ugly it is.
Seriously waiting to the day browsers will work with clojurescript out of the box, without the need to compile.

The language is so clean, clear, easy and data oriented, I find it hard to go back to js.
Also, the docs are much better.

Long live concurrency !

Unpopular opinion: macOS is better for working on the go than Linux.

Don't get me wrong, I absolutely love Linux... for servers and desktops. Linux, particularly Arch, is incredible at running only the bare minimum of what you need in a system, so that you use the power of the machine to fullest. Don't get me started on the out-of-the-box compatibility with development in general.

However, I just spent 2 days trying to get the freaking wifi working on my Linux laptop. When I opened up my Macbook, it *just worked.* I really don't have the time to be dicking around with configs when I am working on the go.

Especially with technologies such as Docker, Git, and SSH, it's actually really easy to have the same development environment on my macbook and Linux desktop... and as much as I hate to say it, I think it's no more Linux on laptops for me anymore.

Motherfucker, do you even review your own code, never mind getting anyone else to do it?

"Hi" randomly added on a new line in the middle of a switch block, a syntax error, as the only change in a file?

Breaking two methods by misunderstanding which database object a variable identifies- but making no other change to those functions? And not adding permissions checks to the new API methods you added in that file?

Overwriting the email template that goes out to users who were added straight to the CRM, by reusing the same file for a template for users that have been invited to an event?

Adding your new fields to the old CRM sync code, again leaving me to figure it out, thereby leaving users' changes likely to be overwritten every morning?

And pushing this to master, supposedly tested, without a heads-up?

How often does your mum need to buy you a new box of crayons? Because these ones are chewed to pieces.

Suck my balls. Or rather don't, you probably don't know you're not meant to use your teeth.

I'm considering to build a powerful, small/semi-portable mini-ITX PC. Just small box you can easily travel with, kinda like a laptop but a lot cheaper and without a screen, keyboard and battery - I can't really work on laptops anyway (ergonomics!). Stuffed with something like a 4400G when Renoir (mainstream Zen2) comes out, so lots of processing power. Add 32GB+ RAM and one or two SSDs.

I'd say the reason is that I might work from abroad (remotely) next year, but honestly, it just gives me an excuse to break my piggy bank!

What do you think?

Why the hell does windows not feature a generell purpose interpreted language? This is horrible! Seriously, out of the box this thing doesnt support anything!

Not Another Gaming Rant!

In gaming, the keyboard and mouse is far superior to a console controller.

So much so it's almost like cheating, gamers are beginning to notice this on the X-Box where traditionally all players in a game would only use a controller.

Now that console players are up against mouse and keyboard players they are out matched and out maneuvered, a great example of this can be seen in live multiplayer Call of Duty games such as Infinite Warfare where the keyboard warrior will spend more time in the air effortlessly jumping from wall to wall gaining an advantage over their opponent.

Multiplayer games should always be evenly matched providing players the ability to compare their level of skill in a competition on a level playing field.

oh my god, vim-plug is just awesome, support for fish out-of-the-box, nicer install interface, also postinstall actions, just switched from vundle!

At the job interview to my current position I was asked the classic ”where do you see yourself in X years” question. I replied something along the lines of that I see myself staying if I feel good where I am and long as I have the opportunities for professional growth.

Now with recent developments it’s looking like those opportunities will be bygone pretty soon. I work on a massive legacy codebase, where with the scarcity of current dev resources and the apparent difficulties of procuring additional personnel to the dev dept, it does look like we’ll be limited to maintenance and simple small scale improvements with no room for meaningful projects. Theoretically I could ask to be moved to another product, but realistically that would both be a dick move well as unlikely to happen, as other projects are fully staffed (and made with technologies there’s easier to find personnel to).

As a consequence of this perceived imminent halt in opportunities for self-development at work, I’ve been starting to look for greener pastures. There are some intriguing ones out there. But then I come here, read some rants and comments, and it always becomes abundantly clear I’m good where I’m at right now. So what of it, if my position won’t enable growth out of the box for a while? I can always develop my skills and knowledge on my free time, and besides, the stagnation won’t last forever... right?

That feeling when Linux has better support for image formats... 😂

I've tried to open ARW files on Windows all day, no luck. Works 'out of the box' on my Antergos system.

My uncle has definitely been my biggest influence. My parents never understood computers and refused to buy one. Eventually my uncle gave me an old Win95 box with an 8GB HDD, and 512 MB of RAM(most other people in the world were running XP at this point). The thing was completely useless as a computer to do work on when I received it.

The internet wasn't really a thing yet back then, but I managed to figure out how to clean up the OS, as well as taking it a part and figuring out the parts.

He was the one who taught me that with computers, all things are possible.

From there he was always buying me books about programming, and pointing me in the right direction. He was never one to give me the answer, but always told me where to look or what to ask.

Now I'm the main web developer at my company and I love what I do.

Corporate life blunts your edge, wants you to follow procedure and process. Then out of nowhere they complain that you're like robots, Think outside the box! Innovate!

Pathetic leeches😢

*laughing maniacally*

Okidoky you lil fucker where you've been hiding...

*streaming tcpdump via SSH to other box, feeding tshark with input filters*

Finally finding a request with an ominous dissector warning about headers...

Not finding anything with silversearcher / ag in the project...

*getting even more pissed causr I've been looking for lil fucker since 2 days*

*generating possible splits of the header name, piping to silversearcher*

*I/O looks like clusterfuck*

Common, it are just dozen gigabytes of text, don't choke just because you have to suck on all the sucking projects this company owns... Don't drown now, lil bukkake princess.

*half an hour later*

Oh... Interesting. Bukkake princess survived and even spilled the tea.

Someone was trying to be overly "eager" to avoid magic numbers...

They concatenated a header name out of several const vars which stem from a static class with like... 300? 400? vars of which I can make no fucking sense at all.

Class literally looks like the most braindamaged thing one could imagine.

And yes... Coming back to the network error I'm debugging since 2 days as it is occuring at erratic intervals and noone knew of course why...

One of the devs changed the const value of one of the variables to have UTF 8 characters. For "cleaner meaning".

Sometimes I just want to electrocute people ...

The reason this didn't pop up all the time was because the test system triggered one call with the header - whenever said dev pushed changes...

And yeah. Test failures can be ignored.
Why bother? Just continue meddling in shit.

I'm glad for the dev that I'm in home office... :@

TLDR: Dev changed const value without thinking, ignoring test failures and I had the fun of debunking for 2 days a mysterious HAProxy failure due to HTTP header validation...

Bought a new toy drone to play with at home, Ryze Yello. It boasts an Open SDK on the box and claims to be programmable. Awesome, I think, I end up buying and going home to get to work.

All is great using the app, I can fly the drone and the video feed is mostly usable. Now let's get in to the SDK and see what we have.

Docs say I've got a few basic commands, 8 directional flips, 6 directions of movement, rotate, takeoff, and land. Plus a config option to set the speed. After a bit of tinkering I discovered that only 3 commands actually work: takeoff, flip, land. The rest error out with no (currently) useful message.

A bit more searching online tells me that they borked the commands with a recent firmware update and are working on it as of 3 months ago.

I wish I knew more about firmware or deconstructing the wifi packets from the app so I could try to do something useful.

So many stupid things I wanted to do with an automated drone and I'm stuck waiting for them to fix their firmware to put functionality back into the device.

I’ve done it again. I started a new online business thinking that some out of the box solutions would work for managing it. Turns out, in spite of my initial thinking that I had covered the bases, it turns out that none of those solutions fully matches my business requirements. So now I have to either rely on my own wits and poor coding skills to roll my own solution or spend money I don’t have to pay someone smarter than me to code my vision all while hoping I’ll find enough customers to recover the cost. What was I thinking?!

I left for a week and someone deployed my code to production after being completely tested by qa on a Friday night. I get into the office after being gone for a week and am told that production has been down for many customers for several days. In a panic I start troubleshooting my code with the "What the fuck did I do wrong" face.

Development and qa were in a frenzy to figure out what happened, several developers were trying to figure out what went wrong by tracing through the source code for days, fucking days!

In that while time Noone thought to roll back the code. So, I was in a bind and thought "might as well get a box". Before that I looked at the deployment instructions: only the dll's were pushed, no db or resource file changes were pushed. In 20 minutes after I got back: no more problems for any customers and everything is working fine.

SMDH.

At least I found this picture of turtles wearing raspberries.

Is it just me or has Windows SDK gone down hill horribly in recent times
WPF -> UWP was a giant and good step
then they kinda killed off UWP, focused on XAML Islands

then came Windows 11 which breaks some UWPs built with WinUI2 coz the components are tied to the OS and not self-contained, so some dont exist in Win11 and the apps crash on runtime

Now there's WinUI3 but it assumes that the starting point is Windows 11, I try to build em on Win10 (coz win11 sucks ass), and intellisense it all crazy

These are all issues one can circumvent IF they align their setups the way MSFT desires
But the fact that these issues exist and wont work out of the box, makes me wonder how long before they start recommending Electron or some other "JS/TS-based UI framework" that'll work within ChakraCore or something. Getting back to WPF/Win32 days

I am so sick with shithead designers that heard about android, but decided it was not important enough to consider it and make their design for android and ios exactly the same. And then force you to implement the ios app in android with the same elements, even supressing native out of the box funcionalities.
They get paid for producing poopy smelly shit.

In the darkest dankest parts of the code, I have discovered a way to get the tag UNDEFINED to show up in this rant. They call things that are unknown a black box. But you see, if you have a good enough shot gun, you can begin to blow enough holes through the box to figure out what's inside. I never said that whatever was inside the box was going to make it out... I just wanna get a good idea of what was inside.

The statement below is correct.
Say what has happened:

196 + 245 = 981

I have never understood people ranting about how Linux is incompatible with their machines. Back in 2006 what ever machine I had tried Linux on was working better with it. More than that all the drivers were working out of the box and the only problem that could possibly happen was with graphics.

FF 10 years. I am using MacBook for some time now and I did no installation of Linux for couple of years now except on bare metal servers. And have just bought my sister a new hp envy. Nothing fucking works. Not even wifi. Installation is hanging and I do not fucking know why! Her previous computer had problems with wifi. If wifi is turned on you could not turn the fucking pc off. It would fucking freeze.

Well fuck my life :(

When Elden Ring come out I ignored it, I was jobless, no money, game was expensive and I got into hate relationship with it.

Some time ago I launched twitch and saw that DLC come out. Struggled between buying or not because it reminded me my struggle with money.

Found that shop in my city sells box version of Elden Ring with DLC for PS5 and they have last one in their store.

I reserved it online without payment and it wasn’t immediate, I started thinking that someone bought it and I won’t play it. Felt happy I won’t spend money on game I hate.

Two hours later I got email that product is ready for picking up and it meant it will be rush hours when I go get it and didn’t liked it.

I work remotely and I’m not used to seeing many people, but well I wanted to play the game if it’s waiting for me.

After I arrived to the shop and went in I met the most honest guy who is selling games.

He asked me if I am souls fan. I said I never played souls game.

He asked three times if I really want to buy this game because it’s hard.
Told me he approached it 3 times already and didn’t stand a chance.

After chitchat I bought the game, paid cash because I love box games and cash anonymity.

Woman cough on me when I was on my way back, I said to myself fucking hell I’m going to be sick and I am starting my vacation next week.

I got really sick with a flu, played straight 2 weeks, I don’t have playstation plus so I can’t read any clues or play online but I don’t care.

It’s even better because you can enjoy more of the world not reading messages like you’re on gaming forum instead of playing game.

Dying from sickness helped me to don’t care about dying in game.

Two weeks later here I am, just killed Mohg and unlocked DLC on my ps5.

In achievements it says that only 38.5% of people killed Mohg.

Now I sit and wonder how many people bought DLC and will never play it because they can’t kill Mohg.

I love Elden Ring now. One of best games I played to this day.

The timing for it was perfect, the sickness, the game, one of the best vacations and one of the best journey in my life.

To whomever organized that adventure in my life.
Thanks, now it’s time to kill some more bosses.

What the fuck is Medium anyway? And what makes them have the audacity to paywall everything? Their site looks like an out-of-the box Wordpress template anyway...

Years ago when I was a kid I was into making things to solve problems. Earlier in my life I remember as a kid seeing a neighbor shove 120VAC into the ground to get worms to come up to the surface. I also remember taking a worm and slapping it on one of the posts and shocking the shit out of myself. Apparently that lesson did not stick.

As a teenager I wanted a device similar to this. So I wired a 120VAC plug and cord to a 1/4" audio connector. I threw this in a box and forgot about it. Years later my sister went through my things looking for a power plug for a synthesizer we had. It had an audio 1/4" plug for headphones. She told me she plugged this cord she found of mine into the synth and it started smoking. She went to pull the plug out and shocked the shit out of her. I don't think that the synth ever worked correctly after that.

Well, today I was thinking fondly about that story. I mean, who wouldn't think fondly about shocking the shit out of your sister (she didn't die, so its okay). However, it was dangerous. Really really dangerous.

The lesson I can take from this memory is this: if you know a software interface (or electrical) is not safe then don't build it. Someone will try and use that shit years later and really fuck some stuff up. I have to wonder. What kind of software traps have I built in the past that are yet to be discovered?

FUCK YOU EMOJIS! FUCK YOU AND YOUR EVER FUCKING GOD DAMN SPECIAL WAY OF BEING HANDLED.

Now that I have that part out...

I really fucking hate emoji at this time. Currently I'm working on one of my projects that has markdown support. One of the things I'm extendending the parser with is github style emoji (eg. :smile:) now this part works great. The problem however is getting that short code into a unicode char for HTML. And at the same time I have to take any unicode emoji inserted into the text box by phones and stuff and convert them into the shortcode (My database does support emoji but it's much nicer to store all emoji with the same standard)

All of this has taken 5 hours of research (needed a database of unicode -> short names) and several hours of converting the data from someone elses json into something I can use. (AKA Shrinking the damn file to only what I need) and now I've spent 5 more hours working on the actual code. And I still don't have it working properly.

Accepting a 3 year old scratched and beaten PowerBook as my "new" dev machine. Especially when my personal, 4 year old one is as powerful but with double the disk space (SSD) and RAM... Then of course the new guys just joining actually do get new out of the box devices just as we're accepting that it's just not how the company works... I guess that's the bane of doing dev in a company that does resourcing as it's main focus thereby never understanding what's needed by us developers and why it is, or rather should be, different from the rest of the company.

I need a bit of advice, I'm looking to rent a dedicated server for dev and test small projects and maybe host a site in the future but mainly a box I can access from everywhere and constantly online
I checked out ovh and server4you but I wanted real experience from a community I can trust, any recommendations?

!rant
Just tried Vapor (server side Swift) for a web api project and expected to be troubleshooting a lot but it was super easy and worked out of the box. Even openapi/swagger generation.
Now I‘m exited to build a fullstack project with native and web clients, completely in Swift. 😁

I need your thoughts on a privacy related matter. I find this fact being very provocative.

So, at work we use Gmail:
Person AB has email AB@company.tld
Person ABC has email ABC@company.tld

How is it that when you send an e-mail to AB, that ABC sends back a god damn Out-of-office, without ABC being in either To, CC or BCC?

I reckon that the mailbox AB is owned by said company, and ABC is the owner of all those accounts. But shouldn't the contents of such mailbox still be private in some regard? (At least until AB isn't in the company anymore?)

It's funny, as a customer said she got an out of office from ABC, while solely sending one to AB.. I noticed this a few weeks back, and I'm rather infuriated by the fact that there's a possibility that every e-mail AB reveives, also ends up in in ABC's box.

🤔

I am really having a hard time keeping an "open" mindset with my team...

So when I email you, the junior at your first job and an almost 6 months work experience, with a set of instructions, I do not want inline comments and feedback to the tune of "Yes, I agree. I think we should go ahead" or debates on why, in your opinion.. xyz, because you tested it yourself..

WHERE THE FUCK DID YOU SETUP AND TEST BILLIONS OF ROWS OF DATA ON YOUR MANY MANY MULTI BOX CLUSTER? You live in a data center? Oh, and say "Serverless" one more fucking time....

And so begins the painful process of performance managing you out the door. (You cant fire anybody in South Africa for being a prick. Or useless.)

I am sure there once was a time where you could beat guys like this to within an inch of his life with his own keyboard. If it wasn't wireless I could have strangled him with the cord. Ah, I miss model M's....

I should've tried Mint sooner the first distro that has just worked out of the box for me.

Easy to install deb packages the ui looks good built in dark theme. If it runs as well on my desktop as it is on my laptop I think I'll have a distro for life.

So, I thought that I would simply be able help improve MacOS Mojave... I thought wrong. They just yesterday rolled out version 2 of the public meta, but it is absolutely horrible. Most Unstable operating system ever to be made. The windows public betas were a lot better. I can’t even install virtual box...

iPad + Apple pencil ONLY for note taking during lectures

Yay or nay?

Got any other combos that arent ms surface with a pen? (Bad experience cause of ssd failures)

Or what about those Wacom tablets? Are they even good in terms of pen to screen response latency?

Educate me if you saw me as an ignorant piece of f but are there any tablet with stylus pen support that are almost input-lag free like the apple pencil with iPad? I once tried it in the store and boi did it truly impress me, also I haven't seen anything else close to it, I tried the Samsung ones, they didn't look to me as fast as the apple pencils

Do you have like out-of-the-box ideas that are not pen and paper? Do write them down

After falling down the Manjaro hole for months I yesterday decided to leave Manjaro for Pop!_OS. I lose a bit of performance and battery life, I gain a ton of UI polish, I gain a lot of package support, and I lose some hard earned nerd points.

My NAS has an easy to install Debian tool for file sync. I can use Etcher for making bootable USB/SD for my raspberry pi. Firefox is the default browser and I can use all my plugins and password manager out of the box. Apt is easier to use than pacman. Easier Python development setup. Docs are more often written for Debian. (For some reason I spent hours trying to get powerline and oh-my-zsh working right in manjaro’s xfce terminal before giving up.)

So here I am with just 4 nights left at my disposal, in which I have to make a Major project worth 10 credits for my college degree and simultaneously prepare for my oncoming exams... You might think what was I doing all these days then!

Well did I mention I was busy contributing to Open source community (mozilla to be precise) which I enjoyed doing more than I would like to cram things up for my exams and do major project which my teachers expect to be an out of the box idea.
F@#$! Education system

I've been using dotnet and aspnetcore for years. I've heard people complain about MVC but I never really saw the problem. The controllers are easy to set up for basic endpoints, I have my domain models and DTOs, and our views I guess is our standalone webpage just consuming jsons.

Only now I'm having to work with an *actual* aspnet MVC stack - server-rendered cshtml and all - and it's dawning on me like a truck what people were actually referring to.

Out of all the issues I've had so far, they have all been due to black box enigmatic voodoo because don't worry about it, the framework takes care of it - it should just work. But what if it doesn't? I have no idea because the trail ends at the bit that should just work.

I should know better than to criticize an entire framework and paradigm made by devs with vastly superior experience and expertise than me, and my issues are absolutely due to being new and unfamiliar with this, but imagine coming up with an architecture to obsessively separate the MVC concerns, then you make cshtml.

Under pressure for a big feature that had to be merged into develop like one month ago. But I couldn't because of issues I discover every single fucking day.

Today's issue is that a Cucumber test fails. I try reproducing it on my machine, it fails with a different error. Apparently I need to download some 10GB database file from some company server.

Alright, let's download it. But it's damn too slow. Well, let's have lunch in the meantime.

I come back, the download timed out at basically the same point I left it at.

I don't wanna try again. Not without trying to improve things. Download speed is ridiculous. Switching from Wi-Fi to Ethernet definitely helps, I thought.

The cable doesn't work. The port LEDs are both off. Is that cable even connected to something? So I follow that damn cable throughout my colleagues' desks. I'm now doing things without even remembering why.

I finally find the other end. It is plugged to the wall. I try another plug, but that fucking LED is still off. A colleague tells me: not all the sockets are actually connected to the switch, you have to call IT to have yours patched. Stay calm, stay caaaaalm...

A small lamp turns on in my head. Maybe something in my laptop is broken. So I try with a colleague's ethernet. That fucking LED is still off. A-ha.

Turns out, the shitty macbook adapter has this Ethernet port that DOESN'T work out of the box. It needs a driver to even realize there's a port. I look for it, I find it. I finally have wired connection. It's like having drinking water again.

I turn off WiFi, I re-try downloading that fucking database.

Nope, it's still stupidly slow. The bottleneck was in the dumbfuck internal server.

FUCK.

At least I have Ethernet now.

I maintain two websites for my employer. The head of my department and my manager decided it’s best for me to focus my time on website A and website B should be replatformed to an out of the box solution. For website B, we’d work with our IT team to find something suitable.

I did some research and came up with a list of possible solutions. IT looked into solutions that would work with the org’s best practices for tech. A few sales pitches and demos were arranged with the top choices.

Stakeholder for website B is really digging in her heels. SH keeps badgering our Product Manager and IT about why can’t we just build in-house. The out of box solutions don’t do everything she wants.

PM tells SH that no solution will be perfect. PM also reminds SH that comparable institutions just use Google sheets/forms and do everything by hand. So choose an out of the box platform or use Google forms.

Plus, the list of improvements the SH wanted for website B would take at least a year if I did them on my own and there’s no budget to out source the labor. That’s not counting bring the code up to best practices or improving database efficiency.

I’m glad I don’t have to work with Stakeholder anymore. SH and her department were just a pain. They want a lot of custom tech solutions but they freak out at the smallest talk about tech issues.

1. Find a function: getDayDiff(d1, d2)
2. d1 and d2 are momentjs dates.
3. See that function performs complex ancient math rituals and then returns an integer
4. Try to rewrite function, return d2.diff(d1, 'days')
5. Should be OK right? Run tests
6. Whole module melts down. WTF?!

Turns out the math performed returned the difference + 1 because it included the current day which moment's diff() function does not (out of the box).

Processes that depended on this function then uses the result like this:

const diff = getDayDiff(d1, d2)
if (diff-1 == should_match) { /* more fun logic */ }

$ git checkout .
$ run-shutdown-script-because-fuck-you

Does anyone have an alternative web framework mostly for an API? Much appreciated if Graphql out of the box.

One "pillar" of Rails is that it's done to optimize programmer happiness. My experience with Rails turned out to be true in that sense.

I was wondering if there's an alternative that could emulate that experience.

So I finally gave Drupal a try as my colleague is thinking pretty highly of it. Well I installed it, checked a bit... Then uninstalled.
Not interested in building websites that look 20 years old out of the box. Plus, it is god damn slow.

I'd rather build custom admins each time. I start to hate CMS systems, even if they can be pretty convenient sometimes.

Helping out a team, I was documenting some code/processes when I came across several classes that was logging a lot of, IMO, 'junk' that was unnecessary (and I knew wasn't being used in any Splunk alerts/reports)

I offer a refactoring suggestion, simplifying the data being logged, moving the duplicate code to a central location, maybe saving 10~20 lines of code. Didn't think it was a big deal because they were already actively working on the code and it was all new code (nothing deployed to production yet). Sent the suggestion to the lead developer and he responds:

Dev: "Yes, the changes looks fine, but not in scope of the project. Any out of scope work will need to be suggested at the end of the project, reviewed by the team, the project manager and approved by the vice president."

"Out of scope"? Logging data to Splunk needs a vice president's approval? WTF?
YOU PROBABLY HAVE THE PROJECT OPEN IN VISUAL STUDIO RIGHT NOW!!!

Along with the documentation the lead dev said they didn't have time to do, I send his boss and the dev team my suggested changes (before-after screen shots of the code) and offered to do the 2 minutes worth of work (again, this was new code, nothing in production and zero side affects to anything).
I even offered to create the splunk reporting/alerting against the data being logged (another item they said they would not have time to do)

About a minute later the lead dev responds..

Dev: "Those changes look good. I'll have Jake make those changes and we can test the logging when we deploy to dev on Monday. Thanks!"

Of course you will...fracking ass hat.

I'll bet my Battlestar Galactica DVD box set he was going to make the changes himself, brag to his boss how he refactored the code, saving X lines of code..blah blah blah to help *me* with documenting the logging portion.

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. ;)

This struck me as funny. Sometimes I wonder if stepping too far out of the box is healthy:

But why can’t Android Studio work out of the box?
I want to develop, Not mixture with gradle and stuff...
Time for a Power Nap.

I swear that Netlify CMS is straight up magic. Finally something that is simple and unopinionated and just works out of the box. After understanding how it works I just plugged it into a hardcoded project and the hardest part was just copy-pasting the content.

I'm not at all familiar with PHP and icelandic hosts.

Does anyone have experience with FlokiNet?

FN supports PHP. But do they support codeigniter out of the box?

I'm a complete newb so I don't even know if I'm asking the right questions.

I want to try something different and what I'm building can't be based in the U.S. And theres not a lot of python hosts outside the U.S. that I'm immediately aware of.

And the ones that are all appear to be hosted in AWS, and I refuse to feed the beast.

css frameworks are a sign your ui/ux team is an empty bag of chips.

vuetify examples look like toys in their docs and work that way in prod. if you put any two vuetify components together on a page you basically dont have a website anymore. mx px are indicators that your styling abstraction is so bad that adding 8 resize shims to every single node on the dom is the correct solution to your visual spacing dilemma.

css offers so many powerful tools out of the box now, and it takes like a week to actually learn them. instead, we cloak all the functionality and expressiveness of modern css in black-box m a t e r i a l d e s i g n and pretend like obtuse blobs are a viable substitute for coherent, accessible, user-friendly ux.

Everyone excited discussing a new data access API to provide to the clients when, le boss:
"Just so you guys think out of the box a bit. What if you deployed the API on Swagger instead of AWS? It seems a nice and fresh approach, huh?"

Everyone on the room remained in silence and internally questioning why do we work here...

Anything made by asus is a fucking garbage.

My first asus laptop was eee pc 701. It had only 2 gigabytes “ssd” which was just a flash drive using usb 2.0 inside. Doing this instead of using a proper sata ssd is like using bunch of rats glued to a frisbee instead of roomba vacuum. It displayed “intel 800mhz processor” in settings but this was only the processor’s name string, in fact it was only 640mhz single core. I still managed to install totally stripped version of windows xp to it and play some old games but overall it was horrible. It also heated up as hell.

My second asus laptop was infamous z99h. It had windows vista and was slow as hell right out of the box. Also BOTH hinges broke in just like six months. It was horrible as well. The screen itself broke in a year.

I also used asus rt-series router and it required a restart every day just to deliver some wifi. Don’t you dare tell me to “uPdATe fIrMwArE”, I pay money for the product and I expect it to work right outside the box.

Asus smartphones was also garbage.

So why have asus laptop if you can have a real laptop like MacBook or thinkpad? Why have asus phone if you can have a real smartphone like iPhone or pixel? Why have asus router if you can have ubiquiti?

Asus drivers suck, and all of asus software is just bloatware.

A monitor
A lamp
A chinese pocket watch
A box with figurines, pens and die for DnD.
A box of pendrives
Ergo mouse
BT Headset
Guts of a laptop
Two identical bottles, one full of vodka, the other water
Five coffee cups
Thomas the cockroach in a sealed bottle. I found him today and I'm waiting for him to suffocate because he can fly and he's 6cm so I'm not gonna risk letting him out by opening the bottle until he's definitely dead.

So I recently purchased Ark and I gotta say I can totally recommend single player/ local multi.

It's not exactly stable. And non-dedicated private servers are pretty limited. But it's fun nonetheless. The animals are neat, the landscape is gorgeous, and the base building is interesting and intuitive.

One of the things I don't exactly love about Minecraft is that your shelter doesn't matter much. Build some walls to keep the mobs out and you're good. But Ark is much more hostile. You need to avoid cold, and rain, and heat, and big Dino's that want to bite you and stomp you. So your shelter actually protects you.

Not only that but materials are so easy to get in Minecraft. You can have a full house by the end of your first day, easily. But Ark makes resource collecting difficult. You need some dino companions to hold your stuff because it becomes too heavy for you alone. And it takes days, maybe even in-game weeks to build a suitable house. And you can spend much, much longer making it more than just a wooden box.

Cool game! Definitely in my top 3 right now.

A serious question: what kind of stack should I choose so I can run a web backend installing no deps whatsoever? I know that Perl works on ubuntu out of the box. Anything else? Maybe Python?
Also, what can be used to replace a reverse proxy like nginx? And what kind of database is available out of the box?

The new MacBooks look so nice. And Mojave is pretty nice, and dark theme! And the touch bar! The price is quite high but for the first time I'm actually debating getting one... Almost. But:

Why no escape key apple! You were so close! A physical escape key at the cost of your touch bar being 1 inch smaller! Is that too much to ask!

Many programmers use Mac. I can see why, it's a bsd variant, it's almost a Linux box except it's supported and accepted by the non-geeks of the world.

Many programmers use Vim! It's great!

So it stands to reason that a "not insignificant" amount of Mac users use Vim. Why would you do this to us? Or at least offer a "Vim model! With physical escape key, some nice out of the box vim buttons for the touch bar, a greatly inflated pricetag... Yknow, the works!" But nothing?! You almost had me apple.

RANT

I am finally coming to the realization that I hate my job. I love working in my field but the place I working for saps my soul. It feels like a battle going to work every day.

I'm not sure if it because it is inherent working in local schools but it always just turns toxic. Teachers think you are their personal slave and why they can't get their class statistics up. Then they complain to the administration. That administration expects us, a skeleton crew, to bend over backwards, stop what we are doing, and fix everything. Because we aren't doing anything at all and we broke their shoot out of spite.

On top of that, and don't get me wrong, 1:1 is nice and all but it isn't just buying devices and giving them to teachers and hoping for the best. You have to invest in support, programs that work for the teachers in using the devices, and TRAIN THE TEACHERS!!! Teachers are smart in their own way but the online lifestyle isn't for everyone or of the box.

All in all, I just hate having to justify everything I do to people who just think everything is free and I have no personal life outside of work.

/rant