Yesterday: Senior dev messages out a screenshot of someone using an extension method I wrote (he didn’t know I wrote it)..

SeniorDev: “OMG…that has to be the stupidest thing I ever saw.”
Me: “Stupid? Why?”
SeniorDev: “Why are they having to check the value from the database to see if it’s DBNull and if it is, return null. The database value is already null. So stupid.”
Me: “DBNull is not null, it has a value. When you call the .ToString, it returns an empty string.”
SeniorDev: ”No it doesn’t, it returns null.”
<oh no he didn’t….the smack down begins>
Me: “Really? Are you sure?”
SeniorDev: “Yes! And if the developer bothered to write any unit tests, he would have known.”
Me: “Unit tests? Why do you assume there aren’t any unit tests? Did you look?”
<at this moment, couple other devs take off their head phones and turn around>
SeniorDev:”Well…uh…I just assumed there aren’t because this is an obvious use case. If there was a test, it would have failed.”
Me: “Well, let’s take a look..”
<open up the test project…navigate to the specific use case>
Me: “Yep, there it is. DBNull.Value.ToString does not return a Null value.”
SeniorDev: “Huh? Must be a new feature of C#. Anyway, if the developers wrote their code correctly, they wouldn’t have to use those extension methods. It’s a mess.”
<trying really hard not drop the F-Bomb or two>
Me: “Couple of years ago the DBAs changed the data access standard so any nullable values would always default to null. So no empty strings, zeros, negative values to indicate a non-value. Downside was now the developers couldn’t assume the value returned the expected data type. What they ended up writing was a lot of code to check the value if it was DBNull. Lots of variations of ‘if …’ , ternary operators, some creative lamda expressions, which led to unexpected behavior in the user interface. Developers blamed the DBAs, DBAs blamed the developers. Remember, Tom and DBA-Sam almost got into a fist fight over it.”
SeniorDev: “Oh…yea…but that’s a management problem, not a programming problem.”
Me: “Probably, but since the developers starting using the extension methods, bug tickets related to mis-matched data has nearly disappeared. When was the last time you saw DBA-Sam complain about the developers?”
SeniorDev: “I guess not for a while, but it’s still no excuse.”
Me: “Excuse? Excuse for what?”
<couple of awkward seconds of silence>
SeniorDev: “Hey, did you guys see the video of the guy punching the kangaroo? It’s hilarious…here, check this out.. ”

Pin shoulders the mat…1 2 3….I win.

What a horrible feeling when you pin a shortcut to taskbar then launch it and you find yourself with two icons on the taskbar.

Worst dev I've interviewed?

"Archie" ran his own consulting business for almost 20 years. Prior to his interview, Archie sent HR (to send to us) his company's website, where he had samples of code for us to review (which was not bad, this guy did know his stuff).
What I found odd was Archie was the lone wolf at his company, but everything I found about him (the about page, his bio, etc), Archie was referred to as 'Mr. Archie Brown'.
Ex. 'Mr. Archie Brown began his humble career and 'Mr. Archie Brown is active in his church and volunteers his time in many charities ...'
Odd to refer to yourself in the third person on your own site, but OK, I like putting hot sauce on my mac & cheese (no judgement here).

Then the interview..standard stuff, then..
Me: "Given your experience, this is an entry level developer position. Do you feel the work would be challenging enough for you?"
Archie: "Yes, Mr. Archie Brown would have no problem starting at bottom. You see ..."

Almost any time he would reference himself, instead of 'me' or 'I', he would say 'Mr. Archie Brown'. As the interview continued, the ego and self-importance grew and grew.
My interview partner wanted to be done by using the escape clause, "PaperTrail, I'm good, do you have any questions?"

Yes, yes I do. I was having too much fun listening to this guy ramble on about himself. I made the interview go the full hour with the majority of time 'Archie' telling us how great he is.

The icing on the cake was my partner caught his gold cuff-links and tie-pin where his initials and how he kept raising his hands and playing with his tie to show us (which I totally missed, then was like "oh yea, that was weird")

After the interview, talking with HR:
HR-Jake: "How did it go?"
John: "Terrible. One of the worst. We would have been done in 10 minutes if PaperTrail didn't keep asking questions."
Me: "Are you kidding!? I had the best time ever. I wish I could have stayed longer."
HR-Jake: "Really? This guy was so full of himself I wasn't sure to even schedule with you guys. With his experience, I thought it deserved at least a round with you two. You think we should give him a chance?"
Me: "Hell no. Never in a million years, no. I never in my whole life met anyone with such a big ego. I mean, he kept referring to himself in the third person. Who does that?"
HR-Jake: "Whew!...yea, he did that in the phone interview too. It was a red flag for us as well."

Couple of weeks later I ran into HR-Jake in the break room.
HR-Jake: "Remember Mr. Archie Brown?"
Me: "To my dying day, I will never forget Mr. Archie Brown."
HR-Jake: "I called him later that day to tell him the good news and he accused me of being a racist. If we didn't give him the job, he was getting a lawyer and sue us for discrimination."
Me: "What the frack!"
HR-Jake: "Yep, and guess what? Got a letter from his lawyer today. I don't think a case will come in front of a judge, but if you have any notes from the interview, I'll need them."
Me: "What are we going to do?"
HR-Jake: "Play the waiting game between lawyers. We're pretty sure he'll run out of money before we do."

After about 6 months, and a theft conviction (that story made the local paper), Mr. Archie Brooks dropped his case (or his lawyers did).

He's been away in the last five days. Something strange ! :\

So I have complained to our landlord about a noisy neighbor who keeps blasting shitty music at midnight, and technically its against the law as well, but this bitch ass joke of a human being ignored even the most highest of authority.

Seeing I can't solve it with democracy, I finally gave up with any reasonable type of way to restrain this motherfucker (even calling police didn't help) and went full asshole with him

I know his WiFi uses WPS PIN, but I'm not gonna throttle his network, I want to piss him off so much he'll regret living beside me, or at our place entirely.

So I performed a Evil Twin attack, I had my Raspberry Pi act as a both cloned AP and a deauther. Finally the plan came to effect.

I ran the deauther in his AP, effectively disconnecting his devices, and had the devices connect to the cloned network. The primary aim of my attack is to annoy this bitch ass to the point of no return. The project I used serves a website on the cloned AP like a update for his router. I intentionally made it run overnight, blasted Lo-fi hip hop and went to sleep. Before I dozed off, I can hear their scream of rage because they can't blast their music at full volume (waddaya guess, they use Spotify).

I finally woke up the next day, and I find neighbor complaining about me, and they were trying to tell the landlord I was hacking them. It's technically true but its not as bad as domestic disturbance for a full fucking week.

Landlord asked me if I did it, I declined, she believed me (I know she does because she knows I'm a pure soul unlike this mofo). Then he left frustrated, threatened to sue me for hacking.

I just smickered, he can't really prove anything unless I was being sloppy.

Nowadays I get good sleep and finally we live in a quite peaceful place now. Now you may ask, what happened to that guy? After he threatened me, the next night he found his things outside his own room, he was kicked out by the landlord.

Moral of the story: we ain't hating on your music taste but don't showcase it like its the most important thing in the world when everyone is sleeping. Case and point, don't be an asshole

!dev

It was late night after work I went into Macdonald's take-away:

Me: Can I have a Maharaja Mac Medium Meal with extra regular fries?

Guy: Yes sir, that will XX.XX amt.

Me: Gives him my card.

Guys: So what's the pin?

Me: What??

Guys: The Pin sir.

Me: Are you ok? Who the hell shares a pin with you?

Guy: Sir, we don't have a wireless swipe machine.

Me: So why is it a take-away if I have to come inside and drop my pin anyways?

*Guy looks awkwardly at other employees. :/

I had to finally get out of the vehicle and I took another 15 mins seperately explaining him why cards have a security pin and that the word security isn't a joke before the pin. With this, I might have also slipped in some GDPR cookie policy along with it. and why Microsoft bought GitHub. Good Lad. He will learn.

So my friend has two-step authentication for his smartphone.

Now he is not able to find his phone.

So, he tried to find his phone by logging into his google account via Android Device Manager.

Now, it is asking for the authentication pin which is in his phone.😂

He just got deadlocked.

It happened to one of my friend at work place.

So my friend is a UI developer and was working on a super critical project with very tight deadline. He was waiting for design team to give him mocks and web api team for giving Apis, so he can start his work. Now there are 4 days left for deadline and none of the parties are ready with their work, and my friend is sitting idle. Management is getting anxious day by day. So one program management lady called him the weak link in the standup meeting and started putting blame on him for the delay in the project. Guy tried to explain that it's not his fault and he is stuck. But that lady was not in a mood to listen.

Now come the next day, in morning he got the design ready and complete Apis from other teams. That day he missed the standup meeting, worked whole night and completed the work with two days remaining for deadline. He went to standup meeting after completing the work, and when the turn came for him to give his status, he started with "the weak link has finished the work". There was a pin drop silent in the room. He continued to give his update like this for next couple of days. And finally that lady was forced to apologize in meeting room by him.

Me: *enters password on phone (long PIN)*
Person next to me is looking at my phone WHILE I enter my password, and as I look at him, he doesn't even turn away and even has the nerve to say:
"Wow, why do you have such a long password!"
Μy answer: "Because of security reasons."
What I actually wanted to say:
"Because of pieces of SHIT like you who can't keep their eyes to themselves, even when PASSWORDS are involved, you FUCK! Guess why everytime I enter a password in public, I have to dim my screen and turn my screen sideways? Because of fuckheads like you, not knowing shit about privacy and security! Fuck you!"

On the first class of cryptography professor says, "Hackers are people who dropped out of school, didn't obey their parents and turned to drugs and alcohol and steal money from people by hacking their facebook."

Then goes on to say, "People tend to keep their birthdate as their debit card's PIN so hacker checks their facebook account, finds their birthdate and goes to ATM machine and hacks their bank account."

I was speechless.

Doot doot.

My day: Eight lines of refactoring around a 10-character fix for a minor production issue. Some tests. Lots of bloody phone calls and conference calls filled with me laughing and getting talked over. Why? Read on.

My boss's day: Trying very very hard to pin random shit on me (and failing because I'm awesome and fuck him). Six hours of drama and freaking out and chewing and yelling that the whole system is broken because of that minor issue. No reading, lots of misunderstanding, lots of panic. Three-way called me specifically to bitch out another coworker in front of me. (Coworker wasn't really in the wrong.) Called a contractor to his house for testing. Finally learned that everything works perfectly in QA (duh, I fixed it hours ago). Desperately waited for me to push to prod. Didn't care enough to do production tests afterwards.

My day afterwards: hey, this Cloudinary transform feature sounds fun! Oh look, I'm done already. Boo. Ask boss for update. Tests still aren't finished. Okay, whatever. Time for bed.

what a joke.

Oh, I talked to the accountant after all of this bullshit happened. Apparently everyone that has quit in the last six years has done so specifically because of the boss. Every. single. person.

I told him it was going to happen again.

I also told him the boss is a druggie with a taste for psychedelics. (It came up in conversation. Absolutely true, too.) It's hilarious because the company lawyer is the accountant's brother.

So stupid.

Fucking Axis Bank ATM

Card swipe
--> Slow GIF
--> Select your transaction
--> Slow GIF
--> Select your account type
--> Slow GIF
--> Enter your amount
--> Slow GIF
--> Enter your pin
--> Slow GIF
--> Slow GIF
--> Slow GIF
--> Unable to dispense money

Sister = bee ( who isn't a stranger to Ubuntu)
Me = Cee

Bee: can I use your laptop?
Cee : why ? Use yours ,it's works fine.
Bee : no I want to use yours and I need to work with windows.
Cee: 🤯
Bee : my work can only be done using windows.
Cee : fine do whatever ( doesn't want to argue )
* Le bee opens MS word, and starts her work *
Cee : 😤😤Seriously?
Bee : I don't like libre
Cee : 😑😑😑^∞
* Few moments later *
Bee : my work is done ,you can have your laptop,btw it's updating.
Cee : 😑😑😑😑😑
* 2000 years later *
*Opens Ubuntu *
*Getting a weird bug*
*Tried to fix *
*Can't open OS files * 👏👏👏🎆
* Windows not shutdown properly *
* Opens windows *
* Not able to login via pin *
* Password ? not accepted *
* Changes outlook password *
* Please chose a password you haven't chosen before *
* Logs in *
* types old pin to change pin *
*You've entered wrong pin too many times *
*System hanging a lot *
* Removes pin *
* Gets huge mcAfee restart system popups , every 10 sec *
* Just shutdown , feels irritated for the rest of the day*

* Regrets dual booting, shd have wiped the windows partition 😫😫*

*Wonders,what the hell did my sister even do to my laptop ?*

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

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

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

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

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

They've generated a very complicated PIN for my new SIM card… 🤔

I spend over 3 hours thinking why my code doesn't work. It turns out you need to attach the code to the game object. Who would have known...........

+++ It is now possible on GitHub to pin important issues and have them appear at the top of the issues page +++

I wonder why banks are always so terribly insecure, given how much money there's for grabs in there for hackers.

Just a while ago I got a new prepaid credit card from bpost, our local postal service that for some reason also does banking. The reason for that being that - thank you 'Murica! - a lot of websites out there don't accept anything but credit cards and PayPal. Because who in their right mind wouldn't use credit cards, right?! As it turns out, it's pretty much every European I've spoken to so far.

That aside, I got that card, all fine and dandy, it's part of the Mastercard network so at least I can get my purchases from those shitty American sites that don't accept anything else now. Looked into the manual of it because bpost's FAQ isn't very clear about what my login data for their online customer area now actually is. Not that their instruction manual was either.

I noticed in that manual that apparently the PIN code can't be changed (for "security reasons", totally not the alternative that probably they didn't want to implement it), and that requesting a forgotten PIN code can be done with as little as calling them up, and they'll then send the password - not a reset form, the password itself! IN THE FUCKING MAIL.

Because that's apparently how financial institutions manage their passwords. The fact that they know your password means that they're storing it in plain text, probably in a database with all the card numbers and CVC's next to it. Wouldn't that be a treasure trove for cybercriminals, I wonder? But YOU the customer can't change your password, because obviously YOU wouldn't be able to maintain a secure password, yet THEY are obviously the ones with all the security and should be the ones to take out of YOUR hands the responsibility to maintain YOUR OWN password.

Banking logic. I fucking love it.

As for their database.. I reckon that that's probably written in COBOL too. Because why wouldn't you.

I don't know what's wrong with my project. But somehow, this is the screening when you debugs a React Native app within DevTools.

I have this little hobby project going on for a while now, and I thought it's worth sharing. Now at first blush this might seem like just another screenshot with neofetch.. but this thing has quite the story to tell. This laptop is no less than 17 years old.

So, a Compaq nx7010, a business laptop from 2004. It has had plenty of software and hardware mods alike. Let's start with the software.

It's running run-off-the-mill Debian 9, with a custom kernel. The reason why it's running that version of Debian is because of bugs in the network driver (ipw2200) in Debian 10, causing it to disconnect after a day or so. Less of an issue in Debian 9, and seemingly fixed by upgrading the kernel to a custom one. And the kernel is actually one of the things where you can save heaps of space when you do it yourself. The kernel package itself is 8.4MB for this one. The headers are 7.4MB. The stock kernels on the other hand (4.19 at downstream revisions 9, 10 and 13) took up a whole GB of space combined. That is how much I've been able to remove, even from headless systems. The stock kernels are incredibly bloated for what they are.

Other than that, most of the data storage is done through NFS over WiFi, which is actually faster than what is inside this laptop (a CF card which I will get to later).

Now let's talk hardware. And at age 17, you can imagine that it has seen quite a bit of maintenance there. The easiest mod is probably the flash mod. These old laptops use IDE for storage rather than SATA. Now the nice thing about IDE is that it actually lives on to this very day, in CF cards. The pinout is exactly the same. So you can use passive IDE-CF adapters and plug in a CF card. Easy!

The next thing I want to talk about is the battery. And um.. why that one is a bad idea to mod. Finding replacements for such old hardware.. good luck with that. So your other option is something called recelling, where you disassemble the battery and, well, replace the cells. The problem is that those battery packs are built like tanks and the disassembly will likely result in a broken battery housing (which you'll still need). Also the controllers inside those battery packs are either too smart or too stupid to play nicely with new cells. On that laptop at least, the new cells still had a perceived capacity of the old ones, while obviously the voltage on the cells themselves didn't change at all. The laptop thought the batteries were done for, despite still being chock full of juice. Then I tried to recalibrate them in the BIOS and fried the battery controller. Do not try to recell the battery, unless you have a spare already. The controllers and battery housings are complete and utter dogshit.

Next up is the display backlight. Originally this laptop used to use a CCFL backlight, which is a tiny tube that is driven at around 2000 volts. To its controller go either 7, 6, 4 or 3 wires, which are all related and I will get to. Signs of it dying are redshift, and eventually it going out until you close the lid and open it up again. The reason for it is that the voltage required to keep that CCFL "excited" rises over time, beyond what the controller can do.

So, 7-pin configuration is 2x VCC (12V), 2x enable (on or off), 1x adjust (analog brightness), and 2x ground. 6-pin gets rid of 1 enable line. Those are the configurations you'll find in CCFL. Then came LED lighting which required much less power to run. So the 4-pin configuration gets rid of a VCC and a ground line. And finally you have the 3-pin configuration which gets rid of the adjust line, and you can just short it to the enable line.

There are some other mods but I'm running out of characters. Why am I telling you all this? The reason is that this laptop doesn't feel any different to use than the ThinkPad x220 and IdeaPad Y700 I have on my desk (with 6c12t, 32G of RAM, ~1TB of SSDs and 2TB HDDs). A hefty setup compared to a very dated one, yet they feel the same. It can do web browsing, I can chat on Telegram with it, and I can do programming on it. So, if you're looking for a hobby project, maybe some kind of restrictions on your hardware to spark that creativity that makes code better, I can highly recommend it. I think I'm almost done with this project, and it was heaps of fun :D

!dev

Getting my breakfast at a hema store, pay by card and my pincode (contactless paying by card is also a thing here) and walk towards the cutlery.

Random guy: HEY YOU! YOU SHOULD PAY CONTACTLESS. PAYING BY PIN IS VERY DANGEROUS. YOU HEAR ME? PAY CONTACTLESS FROM NOW ON!
Me: uhm I usually pay with cash tbh but I don't like paying contactless through card....
Guy: YOU REALLY SHOULD. THEY STOLE MY FUCKING MONEY WHEN I PAID WITH MY CARD + PINCODE.

😶

Other students:
#define redLed 2
#define yellowLed 3
#define greenLed 4
void setup ()
{
pinMode(redLed, OUTPUT);
pinMode(yellowLed, OUTPUT) ;
pinMode(greenLed, OUTPUT) ;
}
Me:
void setup ()
{
for (int i=2;i<5;i++)
pinMode (i, OUTPUT);
}
Proff - This code is wrong it won't work. Where have you specified red led, green led, yellow led?
Me - wtf! Code doesn't know which led is used in what pin it's just pin numbers!

Gave me less marks 😑
P. S. I wrote comments in my code specifying which pin will have what led connected 😑

All bankers are fuckers, fuckin assholes.

I went to bank today.
Gave my card to swipe and he gave me the machine to enter my pin
I entered it
But then it wasn't the actual PIN
Transaction failed

He retried it, but now he didn't give me the machine to enter the PIN, he asked me (whaaat...)
I denied to reveal my PIN
He asked me again and again I still denied.
At last that asshole cancelled the transaction.
And told me to write the deposit slip
Why should I write the slip when I have the card.
Whats wrong with that guy
Why should I give my PIN to him

These assholes come to work at 10 and leave at 3 and their pride is at the peak. They live on our money and showing superiority on us.

I hate them.

> Customer logs Jira ticket claiming app is not working
< I restart the app, investigate and explain tht their server has issues
ø Client closes the ticket as Resolved
-- a couple of days pass by ---

> Customer logs Jira ticket claiming app is not working
< I restart the app, investigate and explain tht their server has issues
ø Client closes the ticket as Resolved
-- a couple of days pass by ---

> Customer logs Jira ticket claiming app is not working
< I restart the app, investigate and explain tht their server has issues
ø Client closes the ticket as Resolved
-- a couple of days pass by ---
<...>

< I log a JIRA ticket explaining what and how is wrong with the server with suggestions how to fix the problem so the app will not crash any longer (client own the server, has his own sysadmins -- I don't even had permissions to open syslog.. had to hack dmesg on their PROD server to pin-point the issue)
> no reaction from customer for weeks. I ping the ticket

× app crashes again

> no reaction from customer for weeks. I ping the ticket
> customer leaves a comment that their sysadmins are looking at it trying to figure out what might be wrong (ignoring what I wrote in ticket's description??? srsly?)

× app crashes again
< I post detail investigation details: snips from logs, screenshots, everything with crystal clear explanations.

> no reaction for weeks
......

well that's fun..

In my current work, I have two systems to work on (let's name em Systems A and B). Both basically do the same thing; both allow users to book facilities available to them.

System A is already in production. My job is to fix any bugs that come up on said system. System B is an improved version that they wanted me to develop. This would follow a different framework etc. I am already halfway through this system.

Now, here's the fucked up part. The code for system A is a massive clusterfuck. It has unused commented code dated back to ancient times where men had the brain of an ape.

And don't get me started on the fucking logic. One part of the code was to retrieve and display the timeslots available for a chosen facility. The code to do that alone takes up 500++ fucking lines, filled with ajax commands, html manipulation and commented, unused codes..AND THAT'S JUST THE FRONTEND!

The fucking backend was not a problem of smelly code anymore. Nope. It was like a programmer had code diarrhea and shat his backend code all over the project. If I had a pin board, I would have made a crazy wall just to understand what some fucknut was trying to achieve.

Anyway, my supervisor told me to fix some bugs on System A. Knowing how the code was, I told her that I could refactor the code. Since I've already achieved that function on System B, with a shorter and cleaner code, I could just copy that and use on System A. But nope. She SPECIFICALLY told me to just "do whatever to fix the bugs. I don't want to waste time on System A." Okay. Makes sense to me. Whatever. I didn't wanna fuck my head up looking through that mess of a cesspool. So, I came up with a few hacks, not thinking of clean code and fixed whatever bugs there was. I then just pushed to the repo (after testing of course).

This bloody morning, supervisor came in and gave me more bugs to fix. When I thought she was done, she said "Hey. I saw the fix you made to the system. The bugs are fixed but the retrieval of the timeslots is now pretty slow. Could you see what is the problem?"

Slow.. She said that it was slow. And asked if I could fix it. I already told her what the problem was and she did not want me to waste time on it. But she wants me to fix it. WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG IN HER BLOODY HEAD! I SWEAR TO GOD... UGHHHHH I swear I was already waterboarding her in my head. YOU WANT FAST?? How bout fucking allowing me to refactor the code?? Fucking shit head. I think I should take up yoga.

Okay so my weekend project went well :D put my retropie system inside of this old r2d2 I've had collecting dust. Has a cooling fan inside as well as a 16x2 lcd I was playing with. Got a red led tied to the rpis txd pin, ports in the front for easy access and power cord and hdmi coming out the back.

Today, I dropped my 5900x while cleaning the computer. It's dead. pins got bent and one pin got loose.

I feel like crying... please send prayers and thoughts.

R.I.P AMD Ryzen 9 5900X 5900x 12 Cores 24 Threads 70 MB Cache 3.7 GHz up to 4.8 GHz. You will be missed.

YouTube, I called it. I freaking called it! This is an old story, it was back when Cryptominer via browser became a thing.

Me: "How long do you thing it will take until YouTube advertisements will contain cryptominer?"

IT WAS A F*CKING JOKE YOUTUBE, I DIDN'T KNOW YOUR ADVERTISEMENT POLICIES ARE REALLY THAT BAD!

A month later, after I said it to an friend, I had increased lags with literally anything I was doing. After some days of research (because I didn't pay that much attention to it at first), I could pin down the cause to my YouTube tab in my browser (because I listen to 24/7 music livestreams). And I was like:

Me: "I bet this is because of cryptominer. I bet this is because of cryptominer."

Guess what. About two weeks later YouTube confessed. Cryptominer ads were possible.

I wonder how much money these companies made...

I appreciate how this 📌 became the official devRant subscription thing.

"For those that don't know: Alpine Linux is a security-oriented, lightweight Linux distribution based on musl libc and busy box. The latest version of Alpine Linux v3.3 weighs in at a whopping 5MB. Not bad for a full blown Linux OS considering 5MB is same size as the Windows Start button."

That last sentence made me laugh so badly :D

I just realised “CSS stylesheets” is basically the same as “LCD display” or “PIN number”.

Although I've heard “LC display” a few times I've never come across something similar for different acronyms. Maybe I'll start saying “CS sheets” or “C stylesheets” 😈

So I thought I will set up a PIN to make logging into the corporate PC easier. Hm... based on these requirements I can probably stick with password.

"Don't install the Docker inside the Docker system, it will break your mind."

fucking hostgator!

go suck a cock you developers!

everything from their payment system to their support is crap.

a few days ago, i purchased a website from hostgator, with a year of hosting during black friday weekend. i had obtained a black friday coupon code that entitled me to roughly $160 off its usual price. that said, i filled out the registration form and clicked the 'checkout' button.

right after i clicked it, i saw i forgot to put in the coupon code, and pressed the back button on my browser. then i put in the code and proceeded with checkout.

guess what?

those MOTHERFUCKING GREEDY ASS BITCHES charged me TWICE, one with the coupon and one without.

i contacted customer support and told them what happened after waiting about double the time i was supposed to be connected to support.

of course, they asked for my fucking "security" pin over the customer support live chat (totally not ironic).

they sent a confirmation email, and cancelled the payment without the coupon.

then ONE FUCKING DAY LATER, I tried to connect to my website.

MY SITE WAS FUCKING SUSPENDED.

die in a hole.

i contacted customer support once more, and after explaining the story, I had to wait four to eight hours.

i'll see how it turns out tomorrow.

die in a hole hostgator🖕

WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCKING FUCK MICROSOFT?!!
I go to log into my laptop:
me: *enter the pin*
Windows: Error
me: Ok let's try the password...
Win: WRONG PASSWORD!
me: *checking my password manager* Nope, pretty sure that's correct... Ok, whatever let's try to reset it.
me: *generates new password and resets the password for the account*
Windows: You can now log in
me: *enters the new password*
Windows: WRONG PASSWORD!
me: that's weird... let's try that again
Windows: WRONG PASSWORD!
me: Ok... reset once more *I enter the same password I generated before*
Windows: ThAt Is An OlD pAsSwOrD
me: *getting really pissed* FINE, GODDAMIT, HERE, NEW PASSWORD
Windows: You can now log in
me: *enters the new new password*
Windows: wRoNg PaSsWoRd!

jdjsjcjj+3+@!o(€;#@!(&(1!!#((#(€_"jsjeucjcjfdjosdifhshabxnfnxjsosoguwqlqqlall#7@+1(
aaaaaáaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa

FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK
YOU FUCKING INCOMPETENT CUNTS AT MICROSOFT!!!!!1!!!!!!!

I'M GONNA FUCKING TEAR YOU INTO THOUSAND PIECES AND THEN RUN YOU THROUGH A SHREDDER!!

YOU MOTHERFUCKING IDIOTIC CUNTS
FREAKING DEGENERATES

Doing linguistic research where I need to parse 2000 files of a total of 36 GB. Since we are using python the first thing I thought was to implement multi threading. Now I changed the total runtime from three days to like one day and a half. But then when I checked the activity monitor I saw only 20 percent of the CPU usage. After a searching process I started to understand how multi threading and multi processing works. Moral of the story: if you want to ping a website till they block you or do easy tasks that will not use up all power of one core, do multi thrading. If you need to do something complicated that can easily consume all the powers of a single CPU core, split up the work and do multi processing. In my case, when I tried to grab information from a website, I did multi thrading since the work is easy and I really wanted to pin the website 16 times simultaneously but only have 4 cores. But when it come to text processing which a single file will take 80 percent of cpu, split it up and do multi processing.

This is just a post for those who are confused with when to use which.

!dev but still rant

So I'm a photocopier technician by day, alcoholic coder by night. Just spent 3 fucking hours trying to diagnose a black line on print outs, checked drums, dev units, toner cartridges, fusing unit, everything...

Called up one of the guys I work with and they said to come back with some samples to try and pin it down...

I turn around to leave and remember I didn't check the transfer belt and lo and behold it isn't cleaning and is smearing the paper...

3 fucking hours to work out such a simple error, I've had program breaking bugs diagnosed and fixed by then... ugh -.-

I absolutely hate software that throws error message boxes that look identical to their "please enter new password" message box.

User called and said they needed their password reset. I give them a temp pin and tell them to press ok to the prompt and then put new password in. She says it is still saying invalid pin. This goes on for 10 minutes. I hang up and try on my laptop. Works fine. Then it hits me.

The message boxes look the same. Have the same width and height and shitty little yellow triangle with ! In the middle. The only difference between them is the text in size 9 font.

Gotta read people...cause sometimes the people developing your software assume you can. And to all the software people out there....end users don't want to fucking read.

This morning there was this window cleaner again, that actually made me remember a rant from the old box - my previous account. Repost of that coming in an hour or so :3

Turns out that he came in the morning, and I completely forgot about it. The only appointment that I had today got canceled so I was like, eh fuck it. There's been this family event yesterday that made me so fucking tired... I'll just stay in bed for a little while longer.

Apparently that window cleaner ringed my bell multiple times, haven't heard him do it but anyway.. he and the cleaning lady had the genius idea to ask my landlord whether they can just barge in my home. Way to start the day, isn't it? I thought there were burglars.

In my bathrobe and visibly pissed off (I am NOT a morning person!), I let him do the window cleaning and waited for them to get the fuck out already. Then that cleaning lady, the fucking bitch that called my landlord to break into my home without MY prior permission!!! While the window cleaner was doing his work, she proceeds to ask me this.

Cleaning lady: "I had this technical issue earlier, and since you are good with phones I thought I'd ask you."
Me (thinking): oh, here it comes.. *rolling eyes*
M: "What's the issue?"
CL: "Well my stepson has an iPhone, which he broke and we brought it to a smartphone repair shop. They repaired it twice but an hour after receipt of the fixed phone, it breaks again."
M (t): You went wrong at iPhone, and you went wrong at visiting that incompetent mofo "teknishan" twice.
M: "Well I have no experience whatsoever with iPhones, but continue."
CL: "Well, he replaced the motherboard, and some pin at the bottom.."
M (t): The fucking motherboard of all things. The whole fucking motherboard?! The last thing that I'd look at, he just replaces like that?! Fucking piece of shit. That's even worse than Apple stores. And what's up with that goddamn pin? CAN'T YOU POSSIBLY BE A BIT MORE SPECIFIC?!
M: "Given only this information, I have no idea what's wrong with it."
CL: "But you are good with these things, aren't you?!"
M: "I disassemble my own broken phones, and dick around with their motherboards. That, while I'm fully aware that in the process I can break it beyond repair. That does not make me an expert on every phone out there."
CL: …

Well what did you even expect, fucking bitch. You barge into my home, don't even have the dignity to leave for me to be able to shower and dress myself, and then you go ask shit like that? Go suck my fucking cock, and shove that iPaperweight down your ass!! How about that?!

Physician, heal thyself.

My friend, Gavin, an air steward (a job that he had done for decades), told me about an incident at work. He said that (shockingly to me) passengers occasionally die on a flight (particularly long-haul), just as a matter of course. This can be because people sometimes travel to visit loved ones BECAUSE they are dying, people sometimes find travelling itself stressful (so it can exacerbate an existing medical condition), or simply that, if you took a large number of people and shut them up in a space together for some considerable time, some of them would pop off through sheer statistical probability. Cabin crew are, apparently, fully trained to deal within this eventually in a calm, almost routine manner.

This particular flight, Gavin was working with another gay man: Peter, who was actually a VERY funny personality. Camp, extravagant and loud, Peter really lit up the place. But naturally, when the very elderly male passenger in seat 38b died peacefully in his sleep halfway across the Atlantic, Peter acted (like the entire crew), with decorum and dignity. As per the protocol, all the lights in the cabin were dimmed. A hush fell over the passengers (Gavin told me that, although no announcement is ever made, the other passengers nearly always instinctively know what's happened, with the news spreading via the media of hushed whispers and nudges). Then, as per standing instructions, two of the crew carefully lifted the deceased out of his seat and gently carried him to the crew station where he was laid down on a bed for the remainder of the flight.

After the late gentleman disappeared behind the discreetly drawn curtain, you could have heard a pin drop. There was a demure pause during which, slowly, the lights went back up.

Suddenly Peter's cheery face appeared, poking through the gap in the drapes. He looked around, blinking brightly with curiosity at the seated passengers, and said, in a voice that echoed around the whole cabin:

"SO! Anyone else have the fish?"

He narrowly avoided getting sacked.

GoodGuy BroCow
Senoir problem
2years back

Senoir dev was assigned to make a webapp for billing

Dude uses dreamviewer and writes code like a bitch

Phpmysqljqueryhtml whole thing mixed very badly and undocumented

His function name format fun_1()

a simple update cost him a day,

Told him to use brackets atleast and also a framework ,guy denies

Days go by

He learns a lot of stuffs from me ,like how to use inspect in chrome lol, how to use sqlite for small projects , and orm and frameworks.

He used to pin his mistakes on me, so that boss gets angry on me

Then i quit the job

2 years went by

Now he is unemployed, nobody wants a 24 year old plain php coder and template editing web developer

Anyway I hired him, he was my first senior, whatever he did,it didnt matter to me, bcoz i remember

the days we spent on the same hall right next to each other coding in php,

days we brainstormed to fix a div

Also the days we ate lunch and breakfast together

I just converted a massive project from C to cuda, I renamed everything, and it just worked.
What the fuck have I done wrong?

Today, my dad can finally ditch his iPhone 4 which is passed down from my eldest sis to my mom and to my dad, all thanks to my brother-in-law getting a Samsung Galaxy J7 on Black Friday.

Finally. No more Apple bullshit in my house!! NO FUCKING MORE!!! *insert hysterical laughter* GOODBYE STUPID 20-PIN CHARGER CABLE~ GOODBYE ITUNES~ GOODBYE ICLOUD~ FUCK YOU!!!

I'm going to kill management.
After a serious migration fiasco at one of our biggest costumers the platform was finally usable again (after two days instead of 10 hours) and, of course, users started to report bugs. So good old po came in ranting that we as qa did a horrible job and basically tried to fault us for a fucked up update (because we produced user pain, which of course not being able to log in didn't do). Among the issues: If the user has more than a hundred web pages the menu starts looking ugly, the translation to dutch in one string on the third submenu of a widget doesn't work and a certain functionality isn't available even if it's activated.
Short, they were either not a use case or very much minor except for that missing function. So today we've looked through the entire test code, testing lists, change logs and so on only to discover that the function was removed actively during the last major update one and a half years ago.

Now it's just waiting for the review meeting with the wonderful talking point "How could effective QA prevent something like this in the future" and throwing that shit into his face.

I mean seriously, if you fuck shit up stand by it. We all make mistakes but trying to pin it on other people is just really, really low.

My day.

07.25 early ringing of phone.

I'm usually dead asleep till 9 o clock.

Went to bed at 01 o clock.

Something crushed at work, needed to be fixed ASAP.

No coffee. Tired. Stinking peace of garbage

08.45 o clock - super market delivery came earlier than expected, while la me was still trying to communicate necessary steps to resolve the issue.

Forgot to pre pay online.

Still had no coffee, still a piece of stinking shit, still tired.

Took me nearly 20 mins to get my PIN right.

Poor delivery guy had unpleasant call from chef, I needed to deescalate.

Back to work, people angry for me being 20 mins away in midst of chaos.

Me back to fixing stuff.

Done at 09.30.

One of these days where everything you touch becomes a large pile of poop and no matter what you do it's wrong.

Yep. The rest of the day went pretty much as bonkers as it started.

At least no work on weekend.

Yay.

And if I don't want a fucking pin?

Since when has this been a thing?!?!

An intern came to us with a build issue, it was very difficult to pin point the cause of issue as there were many modified files in the project. So to figure out the cause one guy git stashed lot of fiiles. Now, intern being not aware of the git stash command thought that all his changes are deleted. The way he freaked out thinking all his changes were lost was amazing. Also other people jumped on the bandwagon, and started questioning the developer that how can you delete the changes of an intern. It went like this for 10 min and finally we told the intern that his changes are safe.

Hey there - I'm pain and I've finally found devRant.

Who wants to be first >:D

Pair-programming... I can't pin-point an exact time, but nearly every time I do pair up and program with someone I have a blast.

I love Larva

Who the fuck uses http code 200 for a failure. Seriously have you ever heard something about a need to parse the shit you're returning...

Now I don't know whether it's me who's wrong, but man there are more than 80 different codes defined so there really should be something for you, don't you think?

And don't give me shit like "well the request worked so we return 200 it's only that the request wasn't correct". What for a fucking peace of something are you... Those codes are for that exact reason.

Anyways I'm going to parse the shit with string compare and afterwards kill myself out of shame. Whish me luck...

Inherited a simple marketplace website that matches job seekers and hospitals in healthcare. Typically, all you need for this sort of thing is a web server, a database with search

But the precious devs decided to go micro-services in a container and db per service fashion. They ended up with over 50 docker containers with 50ish databases. It was a nightmare to scale or maintain!

With 50 database for for a simple web application that clearly needs to share data, integration testing was impossible, data loss became common, very hard to pin down, debugging was a nightmare, and also dangerous to change a service’s schema as dependencies were all tangled up.

The obvious thing was to scale down the infrastructure, so we could scale up properly, in a resource driven manner, rather than following the trend.

We made plans, but the CTO seemed worried about yet another architectural changes, so he invested in more infrastructure services, kubernetes, zipkin, prometheus etc without any idea what problems those infra services would solve.

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

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

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

Give Job

I wanna make you feel what you have brought into my house!!

I was working with security cameras once in a home automation project. One of those camera particularly stand out by offering a cgi without password request to view and change the current passwort and username.

Seriously wtf is wrong with you? I mean this thing automatically connects to an internet service offering everyone to connect to it with that passwort and username. And I know some of you might say "hey chill the cgi is only available on the wifi" - dammit no. Security is a lifestyle do it complete or get the fuck out. God knows what other mistakes there might be hidden in that thing screaming out to everyone to watch me taking a shit.

But that's not the end of it. My company arranged a call to the technical support of that camera so that I can explain the problem and a patch gets released. Those guys didn't give a shit about it and were even laughing at me. Fuck you!

So whoever is responsible - I will find you - and you will never see me coming.

For the very first time, I uploaded my Gem on Rubygems. Open source time ! Yolooooo !

Shutdown you PC and go refresh to mountain.

We should not tolerate censorship.
Beyond all the u.s. hype over elections
(and the division in the west in general), the real story is all the censorship on both sides.
Reasonable voices are quickly banned, while violent voices and loud angry people are amplified.

I broke out of the left-right illusion when
I realized what this was all about. Why
so much fighting in the street was allowed, both
justified and unjustified. Why so much hate
and division and slander, and back and forth
was allowed to be spread.

It's problem, reaction, solution.
The old order of liberal democracy, represented
in the u.s. by the facade of the GOP and DNC,
doesn't know how to handle the free *distributed*
flow of information.

That free-flow of information has caused us to
transition to a *participatory* democracy, where
*networks* are the lever of power, rather than
top down institutions.

Consequently, the power in the *new era* is
to decide, not what the *narrative* is, but
who can even *participate*, in spreading,
ideating, and sharing their opinions on that
narrative, and more broadly, who is even allowed
to participate in society itself.

The u.s. and west wants the chinese model of
control in america. you are part of a network, a
collective, through services and software, and
you can be shut off from *society* itself at
the drop of a pin.

The only way they get that is by creating a crisis,
outright fighting in the streets. Thats why
people keep being released after committing serious
fucking crimes. It's why the DOJ and FBI are
intent on letting both sides people walk.
They want them at each others literal throat,
calling for each other's blood. All so they
can step back and then step in the middle when
the chorus for change cries out loud enough.

And the answer will be

1. regulated tech

2. an end to television media as we know it

3. the ability to shut someone off from any service on a dime

4. new hatespeech laws that will bite *all* sides in the ass.

5. the ability to shape the narrative of society by simply 'pruning' networks as they see fit, limiting the reach of individuals on all sides, who are problematic to
the collective direction.

I was so caught up in the illusion of us-vs-them I didn't
see it before now. This is a monstrous power grab.

And instead of focusing on a farce of election, where the party *organizations* involved are institutional facades for industrialists, we should be focusing on the real issue:

* Failure of law to do its job online, especially failures of slander and libel laws, failures of laws against conspiracy to commit crime or assault

* New laws that offer injunctive relief against censorship, now that tech really is the commons. Because whats worse than someone online whipping up a mob on either side, is
someone who is innocent being *silenced* for disagreeing with something someone in authority said, or for questioning a politician, party, or corporation.

* Very serious felony level laws against doxxing and harassment on all sides, with retroactive application of said laws because theres a lot of people on all sides who won't be satisfied with the outcome until people who are guilty are brought to justice.

A friend saw me on stack overflow and said 'wow, 4,000 points - you must do this all day.' I explained that I just do it to reinforce my understanding and not really for points(although those are useful for bounties). I showed them an account with 22k and tried to show how one might choose questions for maximum points vs quick solves for noobs etc. I write overly thorough answers to try and pin-point the blind spot as opposed to just fixing other people's code. It's not often rewarded by points. My friend - conspiracist - was convinced that the 20+k accounts were cheating the system.

At my old work we had a stack overflow account just for asking embarrassing questions that you didn't want on the company record. Silly, I know. Occasionally some of the guys would use it to have fake arguments or just cause trouble for fun / vote each other's stuff up.

So - I reached into 1Password and signed into that account and showed him that you could essentially vote up your answers but that it's not likely how people get points. I voted up my last 5 personal answers as an example and made some comment like 'that is right.' And that was that. Closed the computer. The next day my account was suspended and I was reprimanded for sockpuppeting. So, - in case you think you can get away with cheap tricks - you can't, which is nice to know - but after reading the email - my face was red for hours. How embarrassing! Not quite as bad as that time I got caught stealing a G.I. Joe action figure at the mall...

Mac: If you try to shoot yourself in the foot, you find out the OS has removed the firing pin from the gun.

Windows: If you try to shoot yourself in the foot, the OS will wrestle you to the ground. You may shoot yourself in the foot, you may shoot yourself in the gut, you may not shoot yourself at all, but they do try.

Linux: If you try and shoot your self in the foot, the OS would like to politely remind you we have *much* bigger guns available - try one if these!

need advice on integrating .t3d file support in c++ engine
hey, been stuck trying to figure out how to get .t3d file support working in our custom game engine, which is all written in c++. it's turning out to be a lot trickier than expected and i'm kinda hitting a wall here. the documentation on .t3d itself is pretty much nonexistent and what's out there is either outdated or too vague to be of any real use. i've tried a few things based on general file parsing logic in c++ but keep running into issues with either reading the files correctly or integrating the data into the engine in a way that actually works. it feels like i'm missing something fundamental but can't pin down what it is. has anyone here gone through this process before or has any experience with .t3d files? i could really use some advice on how to approach this, or even just some resources that explain the format in detail. also, if there are any common pitfalls or things to watch out for when adding new file format support to a game engine, i'd appreciate the heads up. thanks in advance for any help, feeling pretty stuck and any guidance would be a huge help.

*places an order on OnePlus' website for that OP6T*

Alright, payment.. with my bpaid card that I ranted about earlier, because apparently the fuckers accept only credit cards. External payment portal, card's got a chip.. well that's gotta be the same payment process as the usual Bancontact purchases then, right? Where you plug your card into your Digipass card reader, get a start code from the website, type that in, amount to be paid, PIN code, and then it spits out another code that you give to the payment portal.

Except it isn't. That CVC thing is apparently the only thing that stands between you using your card and someone else doing the same with your card information. Not even the card itself! Why the FUCK do we even have PIN codes then?! This is even worse than the magstripe and the skimming issues related to it (the magstripe essentially just blurts out your card information to whatever wants to have it, so demagnetize it and don't use the payment terminals who refuse your card on grounds of not being able to read the magstripe afterwards. Your chip should be responsible for that.. but I digress). Credit cards with chips in it that aren't even used. That's what you Americans use? Seriously?!

At this rate, you can keep your fucking credit cards.

AI everywhere. AI camera, AI photo learning, AI recruiters, AI chat, AI search, AI AI AI.

Area of focus: Native iOS dev

Why: Spent years trying hybrid tools, dealing with the most ridiculous errors, bugs and issues you can begin to comprehend and then ... something magical happened. I got a book on Objective-c, learned a little, tried a simple app ... and it worked ... like properly worked, and on all the devices without taking half the RAM.

I'll say that again as I don't think it landed. In Objective-c, I got no issues where only the CEO's phone + OS version meant I couldn't load a map and a pin (looking at you titanium!!!)

In Objective-c, I wasn't promised storyboards and autolayout, only to find out they are completely different, and may god help you trying to google the issues, as the only ones to show up would be the native tools (looking at you Xamarin)

In Objective-c, my app doesn't instantly consume 125mb of RAM to load a fucking webview (looking at you ... well nearly every other hybrid tool)

... it just works. Then Swift came along and things only got better.

!Dev

the fuck...

I'm not very good in remembering numbers. But I have lots to remember: apartment entrance code, maestrocard pin, phone pin, s few pins at work, and so on. So I remember patterns my finger mskes on a numpad instead [if you have played Ingress, you know exactly how it works].

There is a pattern for a bank card. Another one for phone pin, etc.

I've been using this technique for years... It has never failed me. I never could remember my pins, but give me a keypad and I'll enter it right away.

Last week smth happened. I forgot 2 pins from both of my bank cards... Both at the same day. And I did not have them written down anywhere for years...

Shit

Customer requested the implementation of a "Master PIN" Code for accessing their appliances, to be used by field technicians when the users forgot their PIN.
Actually they could also read or reset it via USB using the config utility, but then again it's much more convenient not having to carry a laptop all the time...

Our only contact person at that company - the guy we got all the requirements from, let's call him Mr. L - wouldn't talk only positive about the company and managers, but we never worried as the project was making good progress.

In the final phase of the project, Mr. L was often hard to reach, always seemed to be busy even when we just needed a prototype approved to start production.
He always claimed to be waiting for approval from his supervisors and engineers, still discussing minor things with them.

When he left the company about three months later, it turned out he was pretty much the only person knowing about the details of the project, and his successor would start asking us very basic questions about the appliance,
wondering why we had implemented certain things the way they were.
(Well, how about we implemented everything just as requested by a former co-worker of yours?!)

Somewhere in the preliminary specs previously exchanged with Mr. L, there is even a hint of a "Master PIN", but the value is never specified anywhere on paper.

Today, we are not sure if anyone except for him even knew about it.
Maybe we should ask them whether they are now selling a product that has a 4-digit backdoor PIN nobody at the company is aware of?

Obviously, it is the birth year of Mr. L.

I've been using Ubuntu 14.04 since it was first released until this moment (June 2018). What a stable OS i've ever used. Thank's Linux, you're free & awesome.

Thank Mr. Trusty & Tahr

!(!(!(!(!(!(!(!rant)))))))
My new HTC smartphone hates me.
First it started to shut down all of the sudden yesterday night, when I was solving quadratic equations on my laptop.
I thought that it might be due to low battery. So I have restarted it. After putting itself into a bootloop for 4 start sequences, it was able to fully start to the page where it told me to enter the security pin to decrypt my files. I also had 30 attempts left. Like a ransomware.

I was like "tf I didn't set anything up".
So I decided to use my first attempt as I had 30 attempts left.
I entered the pin (I can swear that it's correct) and it told me that it has to wipe the /data partition.

I did that. I pressed that button. After waiting for 30 minutes I gave up and rebooted into the bootloader.
Bootloader -> Download Mode -> wipe /data (stock rom + stock recovery btw.)

Some error with "e: mount /cache failed[...]e: mount /data failed"
So, I tried using the adb sideload - no success.
Fastbooted into RUU Mode - HTC keeps rebooting itself into the RUU Mode - no success

Tried to flash the firmware and twrp recovery from Download mode - no success
Then I tried to flash all these things from the sd card - no success

Searched for revolutionary (I know this from my old HTC sensation device).
It wasn't big of any help.

Then someone on xda recommended htcDev (htc's <b>developer-friendly</b> lol site)
I followed every step. Everything seemed to be okay.
I got to the last step.
I needed to get my encrypted token by entering "fastboot oem get_identifier_token" to be able to submit it to HTC, and after they would send me an e-Mail with an .bin file that would let me unlock the bootloader to be able to flash my way through all this headache giving fucking piece of dog shit!

But since I can't back to the phone settings to select the bootloader activation box that would let me get my token... but nah.

FML

------------
Sent by using the devRant web app (:\)

Fuck! My brain just had a catastrophic forgetting!!

I can't remember the PIN of my Android phone that I'm using right now. Luckily, I'm still in because of my finger print but won't help is phone restarts.

Seems like your can't reset PIN without entering previous PIN.

Help!

A newish client just sent a channel ticket marked as "urgent", which set off the alarm for everybody in the chain, with an amazon link to lingerie.

I seriously don't know how to react to this, since I really hope it was a mistake and not how he expects us at the next meeting lol

To send such a ticket you have to confirm your pin and confirm the urgency reason too by the way, so the only thing coming to my mind is, it was some sort of clipboard fail?

Return pin

So, I was going to make a little startup script to a friends laptop. I opened it up to realize I didn't know the PIN (not sure why it used a PIN instead of a password, but it did).

I looked up at the username, and it was in the format [name][number]. I though, "surely, no...." and tried it.

Yup. His username was basically [username][mypassword].

*sigh*

The client doesn't want to give me her PIN code from GoDaddy but I need it to make changes for her.

She told me that GoDaddy's Customer Support told her she can't give her PIN to anyone. I understand that. I told her what to do but she still wants me to do it.

She came up with the idea of teleconference between me, her and GoDaddy (is that even possible?). We live in two different countries.

She could just do it by herself (as I told her what and how to do) or give me the PIN... Nope, she thinks that it's my business to make things up.

Boss wants me to carry on this because she's difficult and may make us bad PR even if she's not right. He doesn't want a shitstorm to handle.

We made few projects for her in the past, she gave us access to all her WordPresses, FTPs, backups, authinfo codes etc but still doesn't trust us. She always thinks dozen times before she gave us some data.

And she's not even a business client. She runs a few blogs about her hobbies. She doesn't make money from them. It's not a big deal but she treats it like a treasure.

It's not easy to be gentle and kind :)

I hate that my bios take twice as long as Linux, to start. It is only 15 seconds, but still.

I love listening to music while coding, mainly metal/rock/classical

Comment with 10 tracks from your playlist .... Here are my 10

0. Disturbed - stricken
1. Tremonti - decay
2. Black label society - bored to tears
3. Ac/dc - back in black
4. Rolling Stones - paint it black
5. Gary Moore- still got the blues
6. Carcass - blind bleeding the blind
7. Alter bridge - metalingus
8. Fear factory - linch pin
9. Pantera - 5 minutes alone

So our new hardware guy who is being managed by our lead embedded developer had the task of designing me an expansion board for my Linux board. The Linux board uses the 40 pin expansion like the raspberry, bananna and orange pi family and as you all know there are many different types of expansion boards for this.
I said at the start come to me and tell me what you want to connect to before deciding which pin you connect to so it is less work for me with Linux board configs and drivers.............
No no no we will sort it all... erm.....
So today they come ask me if they can use an SPI port for GPIO and I am like erm... why there is plenty of GPIO...
It turns out they have been designing the board based on the pin outs of an expansion board and not the actual connector of the Linux board.. I mean seriously WTF!

entering PIN the right way

I'm not saying that windows' Bluetooth is shitty but my Linux connected even before windows realized I had plugged in the dongle. And well Bluetooth headphone won't work... Windows doesn't wanna connect... Solution? Unpair then pair again with pin 0000. Linux: left click on Bluetooth menu > connect.

We have a long standing, transient, occasional error in our system that we haven't quite been able to (or have had the time to) pin down.

I was thinking out loud with our project lead what the cause could be, which - before I realized it - segwayed seamlessy into me being tasked with hotfixing it in order to unblock some other tasks that people expect to start working on tomorrow.

I think I'm starting to see why people use inanimate objects for rubber ducking instead of other devs. Here's hoping my theory checks out.

So, I got an iFixIt toolkit with a gift card from xmas. Was excited to tear into my iPhone6 given that it had lasted me a long time, and not that long ago, I had the screen repaired given I didn't know how to at the time and was working stupid long hours. I haven't used the phone in about 6 months now.

Wtf.

I open the device, and immediately 2 screws and a bracket fall out of the device. The inside is filthy, and appears to have corrosion (despite the fact I've never gotten water on it, I was kinda anal with that phone).

Whoever the guy was who "fixed" my screen apparently did so in a way that involved spilling something on my phone, over torquing a screw, breaking a bracket, and the entire thing looks sketch.

All while charging over $100. I can see why he insisted on having an otterbox on the phone now, he fucked up and was worried the one screw pin wouldn't hold the screen on. Motherfucking asshole.

Mom: hey I can't get into the phone, the PIN and PUK aren't working. See if you can fix it otherwise you'll have to go to the communications company to ask for a new card (my mom is working and can't do it)
Me: //gives it another try. Doesn't work. Searches online. Yep, can't do anything, it needs a new card
Me: sorry mom, you have to get a new card, there's nothing I can do.
Mom: OK
Me: why did you ask me for help, again?
Mom: well because you can do things and fix things and so, and I thought that maybe you could fix it
Me: 😑

I am in love.
I am in love with all the guys and girls working at Microchip support.
I am the kind of user that does not really understand what he's doing/what he wants to do, so I am constantly stuck in stupid configuration errors or looking for impossible solutions, yes I am THAT kind of a user...

Here is a PWM working, a support guy spent some minutes telling me that I have to connect to the right pin.
Ok, he had to tell me twice.😳
Thank you, it may have taken me days to find out this.

They does not know, but there is a HUGE amount of decreasing dumb question incoming 😈
Please be kind with me, and don't get mad when things will get serious, I will probably bring hell in your office, I am very sorry for that...

Still, thank you for helping the dumbest learner-by-mistake that doesn't know how to recognize a mistake.

I can't write this in the ticket system, I hope someone of you use devRant! (atsame54 office, I am talking with you!)

You are my stack overflow, and the project I will develop with your help is quite the only thing left before my graduate.

I will owe you so much beers, love you guys!!!

My kind of pin-up

We had 1 Android app to be developed for charity org for data collection for ground water level increase competition among villages.

Initial scope was very small & feasible. Around 10 forms with 3-4 fields in each to be developed in 2 months (1 for dev, 1 for testing). There was a prod version which had similar forms with no validations etc.

We had received prod source, which was total junk. No KT was given.

In existing source, spelling mistakes were there in the era of spell/grammar checking tools.

There were rural names of classes, variables in regional language in English letters & that regional language is somewhat known to some developers but even they don't know those rural names' meanings. This costed us at great length in visualizing data flow between entities. Even Google translate wasn't reliable for this language due to low Internet penetration in that language region.

OOP wasn't followed, so at 10 places exact same code exists. If error or bug needed to be fixed it had to be fixed at all those 10 places.

No foreign key relationships was there in database while actually there were logical relations among different entites.

No created, updated timestamps in records at app side to have audit trail.

Small part of that existing source was quite good with Fragments, MVP etc. while other part was ancient Activities with business logic.

We have to support Android 4.0 to 9.0 of many screen sizes & resolutions without any target devices issued to us by the client.

Then Corona lockdown happened & during that suddenly client side professionals became over efficient.

Client started adding requirements like very complex validation which has inter-entity dependencies. Then they started filing bugs from prod version on us.

Let's come to the developers' expertise,
2 developers with 8+ years of experience & they're not knowing how to resolve conflicts in git merge which were created by them only due to not following git best practice for coding like only appending new implementation in existing classes for easy auto merge etc.

They are thinking like handling click events is called development.

They don't want to think about OOP, well structured code. They don't want to re-use code mostly & when they copy paste, they think it's called re-use.

They wanted to follow old school Java development in memory scarce Android app life cycle in end user phone. They don't understand memory leaks, even though it's pin pointed by memory leak detection tools (Leak canary etc.).

Now 3.5 months are over, that competition was called off for this year due to Corona & development is still ongoing.

We are nowhere close to completion even for initial internal QA round.

On top of this, nothing is billable so it's like financial suicide.

Remember whatever said here is only 10% of what is faced.

- An Engineering lead in a half billion dollar company.

Jeez maybe it's just me, not a very smart user, but after at least 6 years with iPhone5, just before changing it, I discovered how to raise the volume without logging in the phone first:

I press the home button, Siri show up, and THEN the fucking raise/lower audio buttons are working.

6 years typing the fucking pin just to raise the volume.
6 fucking years missing notifications and calls just because I forgot the fucking volume on the lower tone. Almost lost a girlfriend for that.

Ooops, I was wrong again :/

The worst type of debugging: Programming an MCU without a Serial Monitor.

Some Context: I've spendt today about 3h+ on getting an attiny 45 to read 3 digital values on 3 pins. So for every test I wanted to make, I needed to put the MCU inside a socket put this socket on a arduino and flash it. Then extract it from the socket and put it on a breadboard for testing.
After getting headaches for nothing making any goddamn sense, I ended up noticing that one input pin is a multiplexed reset pin with the reset having top priority and no way to change it. So whenever this pin should have read a low signal, it got held in reset! FML

If AI can create an email address, register to instagram, post a photo randomly based on AI feeling or conditions, then reply a comment. I will follow that account.

Older tech support story, but still a frusterating one.

Sister was running Windows 8.1 (ew) when Microsoft was ramming Windows 10 down everyone's throat.

Her laptop decided to update to Windows 10, and after waiting awhile, she decided to unplug the laptop's battery and power chord.

This did what you expected, corrupted her install, leading to a bootloop. I then got to deal with that to try and recover it.

Once I got into the recovery mode, it wanted her password to restore from a system image, guess what she forgot?

She tried her PIN, and gave up after a few attempts, and I got to reinstall Windows for her.

Lesson learned from this? If you're the IT person of the house, make sure that you have an account on all machines that you may administrate. That way you don't need to deal with this shit.

1809 is going to be my new PIN number.

TIL you can crash a Tomcat request processing if the app reads request bodies using a reader() and you feed it a json body with an innocent nbsp :) the whole request processing just goes *pooooft*

reminds me of an ios bug which could brick the phone if it received an sms with weird chars.

These lynch-pin-bugs where a single byte/char in the right place at the right time can tear things down, are so subtle and fascinate me for some reason :)

FUCK AWS. Instead of making consistent api everyone seems to do whatever the fuck they want. They are not even consistent when it comes to the same fucking service or even the same fucking call which is called two different ways...

Sofjfufifieeoejebebeoeoieiejdjdbsehu82

How about 'Pin Rant' option on profile?

I have 9 voicemails on my work phone. We have to change our six+ digit PIN every month, so I'm just going to not check my voicemails.

How to spend more time writing docs then code?
15m = doc
1m = code

<code>
/* Motor DC + Mosfet IRF520 + Servo
Materials:
IRF520 (Mosfet) + Dc motor + Batery (3V min)
diode (1N4007?)
Changed Tip122 for IRF520: Tip122 has less resistance and produces more heat

Hardware:
ARDUINO = A(port , 5V , GND)
MOSFET = M(A[port] , + , GND)
MOTOR = MOTOR(+ , -)
BATERIA = BAT(+ , -)
DIODO = D(sinal_1 , sinal_2)

MOSFET
M(port) = A(port)
M(+) = D(sinal_1) AND MOTOR(+)
M(GND) = A(GND)

D(sinal_2) = B(+) AND MOTOR(-)

ARDUINO
A(port) = M(port)
5V = null
A(GND) = M(GND) AND BAT(-)

*/

#define motorPIN 8 // A(port)
int loopy = 0; // Loop variable to limit de program

void setup()
{
// Initialize the motor pin as an output:
pinMode(motorPIN, OUTPUT);

}

void loop() // 1 loop == 100ms
{
if (loopy < 10) // Turns motor ON for 1 second
{
digitalWrite(motorPIN, HIGH);
}
else // Turns motor OFF
{
digitalWrite(motorPIN, LOW);
}
}

</code>

So while exploring some new ideas, I decided to figure out if I could use variables in the known set to determine the bounds of variables in the unknown set.

The variables in question are algebraic identities derived from the semiprimes, so you already know where this is going.

The existing known set is 1194 identities.
And there are, if I recall, roughly two dozen unknowns.

Many knowns have the unknowns as their factors. The d4 product set for example is composed of variables d4a, d4u, d4z, d4z9, d4z4, d4alpha, d4theta, d4omega, etc.
The component variables themselves are unknown, just their products are known. Anyway.

What I've found interesting is if you know the minimum of some of these subsets, for example d4z is smallest out of the d4's for some semiprimes, then you know the upperbound of both the component variables d4 and z.

Unless of course either of them is < 1.

So the order of these variables, based on value, changes depending on the properties of the semiprime, which I won't get into. Most of the time the order change is minor, but for some variables they can vary a lot between semiprimes, rapidly shifting their rank in the known set. This makes it hard to do anything with them.

And what I found myself asking, over and over again, was if there was a way to lock them down? Think of it like a giant switch board, where flipping one switch lights up N number of others, apparently at random. But flipping some other switch completely alters how that first switch works and what lights it seemingly interacts with. And you have a board of them thats 1194^2 in total. So what do you do?

I'd had a similar notion a while back, where I would measure relative value in the known set, among a bunch of variables, assign a letter if the conditions were present, and generate a string, called a "haplotype."
It was hap hazard and I wrote a lot of code to do filtering, sorting, and set manipulation to find sets of elements in common, unique elements, etc. But the 'type' strings, a jumble of random letters, were only useful say, forty percent of the time. For example if a semiprime had a particular type starting with a certain series of letters, 40% of the time a certain known variable was guaranteed to be above a certain variable from the unknown set...40%~ of the time.
It was a lost cause it seemed.

But I returned to the idea recently and revamped the entire notion.

Instead what I would approach it from a more complete angle.
I'd take two known variables J and K, one would be called the indicator, and the other would be the 'target'.
Two other variables would be the 'component' variables (an element taken from the unknown set), and the constraint variable (could be from either the known or unknown set).

The idea was that relationships between the KNOWN variables (an indicator and a target variable) could be used to indicate the rank relationship between the unknown component variable and the constraint variable.

You'd think this wouldn't work either, but my intuition was there were so many seemingly 'random' rank changes of variables in the known set for any two semiprimes, that 1. no two semiprimes ever shared the same order for every variable, and 2. the order of the known variables had to be leaking information about the relationships of the unknown variables.

It turns out my intuition was correct.

Imagine you are picking a lock, and by knowing the order and position of the first two pins, you are able to deduce the relative position of two pins further back that you can't reach because of the locks security features. It doesn't let you unlock the lock directly, but by knowing this, if you can get past the lock's security features, you have a chance of using information about the third pin to get a better, if incomplete, understanding about the boundary position of the last pin.

I would initiate a big scoring list, one for each known element or identity. And then I would check it in tandem like so:

if component > constraint and indicator > target:
indicator[j]+= 1

This is a simplication, but the idea was to score ALL such combination of relationship, whether the indicator was greater than the target at the same time a component was greater than a constraint, or the opposite.
This worked out to four if checks and four separate score lists.

And by subtracting one scorelist from another, I could check for variables that were a bad fit: they'd have equal probability of scoring for example, where they were greater than the target one time, and then lesser than it for another semiprime.

So for any given relationship, greater or lesser between any unknown variable and constraint variable, I could find any indicator variable and target variable whose relationship strongly correlated to the unknown's.

We're making reusable rockets and putting cars in space but I still can't pay with my fingerprint instead of a fucking pin code.

My (junior) colleague gives me an existential crisis as he builds a fabric.js clone from scratch up in very little time.

Then he tells me he forgot his 4 digit bank pin he's be using for 7 years.

Ok, a customer came to us saying he had a product that is just randomly rebooting. It sure must be a software issue.

I got the task and worked my way through ~10k lines of assembly code (8085 processor on board) Weeks go by, i tested every single god damn funktion they had, analyzed every vector they put in, finding NOTHING...

Meanwhile the hardware department analyzed and tested some possible culprits on the product for me. I had NO idea what the problem could be...

Then hardware department said: oh, they forgot a resistor on the FUCKIN RESET PIN OF THE PROCESSOR!!!!!

fml...

A Bible app for Android called Tour the Bible. It uses the Google maps API to put a pin in each location as you read so you can follow along and virtually "tour" the Bible.

I had a basic version built but then I switched to Kotlin then I pretty much completely rewrote it to use an api for the Bible content instead of plain .txt files. I still try to work on it in my spare time but with a family, full time job, full time school and part time freelancing I don't get much spare time.

A bit late but I just remembered this story.. at my college the people in the IT department always watch for when another professor or student leaves their computer unlocked and then change their wallpaper to something funny (e.g. my little pony). One time the instructor from the class before mine left their machine logged in and my professor asked the class "what should we do?"

I suggested he modify the chrome shortcut on the desktop and change the path to 'C:\windows\system32\cmd.exe /c shutdown /r /t 0' then pin it to the taskbar. And he did it.

I wasn't in that class but I heard that she clicked it 3 times before she figured out what was going on. She never fixed it the whole rest of the quarter (simply launching chrome from the start menu) and would occasionally forget and click the taskbar icon and go through the whole thing again.

As fate would have it I got 2 classes with that instructor the next quarter. We're friends so it's all good but I still get flack about it and I don't dare leave my computer unlocked xD

Guyz let hack this
Here is the tea

A house wife forgot her bank 'ATM PIN' which is a four digit number, but luckily she remembered some hints on how to recall this 'PIN'
Here are some of the clues
(1) The 1st digit is half of the 2nd
(2) The sum of the 2nd and 3rd is 10
(3) The 4th is equal to the 2nd plus 1
(4) The sum of all the digits is 23

What is the ATM PIN ?

I just had such a forfilling moment.

Normally, i often (force myself) go to bed at night, after i worked on a project of mine, with these thought saying "oh man i wanted to get that feature done today" or "i want to finish this and that part of my code".I am sure everyone of you knows the feeling, when your brain communicates that you are just not done for today.

Today it was different. I got a project of mine working in it's first state, where i put much heart, love and time in.Just a few minutes before i finished for today i got my server responding the expected numbers(some kind of pin-code). It's a very easy system: Someone(at the time only me and my debug mode :3) on a android phone request a verification which is checked and processed by the server. The server creates a random six-digit number, returns it encoded to the client and sends an email to the user, which currently sends it in plain text(shame on me).
Yeah, the user enters the number and voilà
And of course, all the Pincodes can only be used once.
I got to bed with this feeling of luck and succes.

I hope tomorrow is going to be a productive day!

I am so lucky right now.

Have a good day everyone!

Windows 10 Action Center yesterday alerted me to set a PIN for my laptop.

Turned on PC this morning and typed in my regular password then realized it wanted the PIN.

Thinking how this feature came to be....

1. Windows wants you to link your login to your Microsoft/Hotmail Account and it makes it a pain in the ass to set a seperate one (Windows 8)
2. 2018 arrived an logins are a pain, everything is autologin or PIN/code based (aka short 'unsecure' passwords)
3. MS backtracks and realizes email logins are too long so they make a partial fix which basically reverts back to the pre-Win8 days of a seperate system login.. except now its called a new feature!

I realized now under enter a PIN the reason for the checkbox that says: Allow symbols and letters. It's a nice way of saying: please type in your old password again.

**Also rant #2: cuz i dont feel like waiting 1hr**
I felt great yesterday when my boss told me apparantly I have like an Expert designation at the company.

Feel like crap today cuz some user is complaining about some report:
- they asked us to create months ago
- now complaining its all wrong but never gave any formal requirements and actually did sign off on it during testing
- FIXED ASAP

HELLO!!!!!!!!!!! STOP MAKING IT SOUND LIKE IT'S MY FAULT U CAN'T BE BOTHERED TO PROVIDE CLEAR REQUIREMENTS AND THEN TAKING FOREVER TO COME BACK WITH UR PROBLEMS AND NOW NEED IT FIXED ASAP BY USING A NEW DATA SOURCE THAT I HAVE NO IDEA WHAT THE FUCK IS SINCE U USED A RANDOM ABBREVIATION LIKE I CAN MIND READ.

IF I COULD MINDREAD, ID BE WORKING ON A PLAN TO GET UR ASS FIRED.....

Happy friday and long weekend... Got 3 days to relax before i need to deal with this shit again...

That awkward moment when you're trying to find patterns to pin point trade ahead transactions on stock market and you realized that you were hired as Android developer.

lol

I had weird apple charges on my credit card so I called the bank and told them I didn't do them and own nothing apple.
they cancelled my card and sent me a new one.
the new one came with a paper saying I need to activate it and the first time I use it I might need to type in the pin.

credit cards typically worked if you insert or swipe you have to type in pin,
and you can wave it over the machine for small charges and that won't ask for pin, which is probably what they're saying is I can't wave until I pin.

so I go to the nearby grocery store so I can activate the card with the pin and order online groceries later, and coincidentally they have a new payment machine (why?), one of those without buttons that just looks like a phone.
I insert it, expecting it to ask me a pin... it beeps saying approved

so

I got credit card fraud and they sent me a new card
and the new card is literally less secure

it's like banks want fraud

when I was calling in or being re-routed with the bank the messages were always "higher number of calls than expected"

how bad is financial fraud rn. why are they making it worse

I don't think my card was leaked due to pinning though. when you order stuff online there should be an approval process on your end to confirm but it just doesn't exist. so if anyone gets your credit card info they can just sell that. I had to order a very hard to find drug from one sketchy (to me) website and after I did so that email got signed up to a weird newsletter and I harassed the shit out of that newsletter company for contacting me. I would assume they also sold my credit card details, or it "leaked" in a hack, whatever. this whole damned circus. I have 4 months of the drug but at some point I'll need more and they're the only ones that have it... so I guess I'll get to find out

What the hell happened to the dotnet ecosystem in terms of stacktraces and async.

You used to be able to pin down your issues to the freaking exact line number using a stacktrace, but now im building a azure function and this is the crap im served when it blows up: How do you debug this?

Besides assorted craft materials and PC my desk has a dual purpose crocheted rubber duck: it serves as a pin cushion and my debugging friend! I made him and he has lived there since my first year of university.
I also keep a mug from my university, scented candles, notepad and pen (for all my tech savvy-ness, quick notes are still better handwritten) and whatever crafty project I'm working on.

My desk is honestly a mess (I have to clear it ~three times a week to have any space to work on) but they say creative people have messy workstations so I take my inability to keep an orderly environment as an expression of my creativity.

So I got my sister a new PC and being the thrifty (and masochistic) fuck I am, I thought I'd build it myself. I built the PC yesterday (side note: Stick to backplate coolers, Push-Pin is the bane of my existence, patience and fingers) and wanted to install Windows today.
I shit you not, I ran this godforsaken spawn of Satan of 'Windows Media Creator Tool' no less than 5 times with different USB sticks, different Ports, turned off AV and FW and as Administrator but stuff ain't working. After ~30min of downloading Windows each time, it always told me in usual Windows manner "Something went wrong", because who needs decent error messages anyway...

Yesterday I bought a book. I did not know about it. So I read the first few pages before purchasing it. I did not look for the review online. I paid by card - not through my phone or contactless, just plain old card going into a chip and pin device.

This morning I got an advert in Facebook that I should buy the second part of the book. I know they snoop my online activity. In a weird way I kind of accepted it. I guess my question is how'd they know so much of my personal life.

I'd probably will leave Facebook today. I am sure they are watching this status as well. I hope the jackass behind this learns in my own small way I tried to stand up against their jackassery. Like everyone else here I from IT. I hope some one (or many) from this extraordinary community who is a lot more capable than I am, stands up to this invasion and make an end to this snooping.

Having gone to a bank to reset a password again today (Yes, I forgot it for like... 3rd time, don't judge me, its my backup bank account I need to access like... once a year), I was once again made to think - I come in, give them my state ID by which they authorize that I can even make a password reset request.

Then they give me a tablet to... sign a contract addendum?

Its not the contract part that always makes me stop and think though - its the "sign" part.

I'd wager that I am not the only one who only ever uses a computer to write text these days. So... My handwriting got a lot jerkier, less dependable. Soooo... My signature can be wildly different each time.......

And if my signature varies a lot... then... what is the point of having it on a piece of paper?

I know its just a legal measure of some sort... And that, if it came down to someone impersonating me and I'd go to court with the bank, there would be specialists who can tell if a signature was forged or not... But...

Come on, the computer world has so much more reliable, uncrackable, unforgable solutions already... Why... Don't all folks of the modern world already have some sort of... state-assigned private/public keypairs that could be used to sign official documents instead?

It costs money, takes time to develop etc... But... Then, there would not only be no need to sign papers anymore... And it would be incredibly hard to forge.

The key could even be encrypted, so the person wishing to sign something would have to know a PIN code or a password or something...

tl;dr: I hate physical signatures as a method of authentication / authorization. I wish the modern world would use PKI cryptography instead...

Google you are Awesome!
Pin scores without installing any app..

Open office plans are a GREAT idea. Nothing says productivity like hearing a pin drop from across the building. Who needs good acoustics anyways? And you bet your ass the moment anything sensitive to background noise is going on you're no longer allowed to communicate at all, because even a potato plugged into an audio jack can hear you whisper from 50 feet away. Good thing we don't do that often - only on days that end in Y, I assume.

A conversation that i had with my co-worker today. I was having trouble getting into UAT to troubleshoot.

me
i lost access to UAT again

co-worker
F. So secure we can't even get in

me:
lol

co-worker:
I'll email whoever we did last

me:
i can get through the first phase(where you enter pin+rsa)
it denies me access after that
says bad username or password

co-worker:
Oh ok. Prolly just need to reset your pwd then. I'll find the email for helpdesk and fwd.
At least ur RSA works.

me:
yeah what a joy

co-worker:
If it's locked you may need to try from a Windows box. Horizon is bugged on Mac where the submit button stays disabled even when you type a pwd.

me:
i couldnt contain my happiness that my RSA worked
😃

co-worker:
Yeah it's exhilarating
Whenever I pick up my rsa token my life re-finds it's purpose and I feel like I'm meddling through a field of sunflowers.

I once tried to get my RSA token tattooed but it switched too quick.

me:
lol its faster that Usain Bolt

co worker:
Russia got kicked out because of their RSA tokens

Why the fuck is debit cards that don't need a PIN for transactions even a thing? What is so difficult to understand or implement in a two factor authentication? Like do these companies have meetings where some fucktard proposes removing a crucial security feature and the others just nod approval?

I can't pin down a favorite coworker, but I aim to be most everyone else's favorite :)

I've just updated my phone, and I have now realised I don't remember my new PIN and I haven't written it down anywhere.
FUCK!

I like a Product Manager/Owner/CTO who invites coffee when a dev burnout. This is not a story, a hope seems to be.

The bank keeps sending the *don't share your online pin* reminders but can't fix their servers where I'd access the same :|

Ok, bug 2.
Another iOS one. I was handed an app that was built half-assedly by another team in a couple of days for a demo, And I had to maintain it and get it into a release-able state.
Someone had implemented deep linking in the app, so you could open a record by using a url from Safari/email etc. Worked fine. Problem was, the app had a login/pin screen, and if you werent authenticated and you tried to link from a url, it would just bring you to the login screen and once you logged in it would take you to the main menu rather than where you wanted to go.
So I added some logic to the linking code that if the app wasnt authenticated it would save the link in a kind of global variable. Then once you logged in and the app entered the authenticated state, it would check for a saved link and execute it if present, then clear it so that it wouldnt try to open every time you log in.
That was an interesting one to try and solve.

So I promised a post after work last night, discussing the new factorization technique.

As before, I use a method called decon() that takes any number, like 697 for example, and first breaks it down into the respective digits and magnitudes.

697 becomes -> 600, 90, and 7.

It then factors *those* to give a decomposition matrix that looks something like the following when printed out:

offset: 3, exp: [[Decimal('2'), Decimal('3')], [Decimal('3'), Decimal('1')], [Decimal('5'), Decimal('2')]]

offset: 2, exp: [[Decimal('2'), Decimal('1')], [Decimal('3'), Decimal('2')], [Decimal('5'), Decimal('1')]]

offset: 1, exp: [[Decimal('7'), Decimal('1')]]

Each entry is a pair of numbers representing a prime base and an exponent.

Now the idea was that, in theory, at each magnitude of a product, we could actually search through the *range* of the product of these exponents.

So for offset three (600) here, we're looking at

2^3 * 3 ^ 1 * 5 ^ 2.

But actually we're searching

2^3 * 3 ^ 1 * 5 ^ 2.
2^3 * 3 ^ 1 * 5 ^ 1
2^3 * 3 ^ 1 * 5 ^ 0
2^3 * 3 ^ 0 * 5 ^ 2.
2^3 * 3 ^ 1 * 5 ^ 1

etc..

On the basis that whatever it generates may be the digits of another magnitude in one of our target product's factors.

And the first optimization or filter we can apply is to notice that assuming our factors pq=n,
and where p <= q, it will always be more efficient to search for the digits of p (because its under n^0.5 or the square root), than the larger factor q.

So by implication we can filter out any product of this exponent search that is greater than the square root of n.

Writing this code was a bit of a headache because I had to deal with potentially very large lists of bases and exponents, so I couldn't just use loops within loops.

Instead I resorted to writing a three state state machine that 'counted down' across these exponents, and it just works.

And now, in practice this doesn't immediately give us anything useful. And I had hoped this would at least give us *upperbounds* to start our search from, for any particular digit of a product's factors at a given magnitude. So the 12 digit (or pick a magnitude out of a hat) of an example product might give us an upperbound on the 2's exponent for that same digit in our lowest factor q of n.

It didn't work out that way. Sometimes there would be 'inversions', where the exponent of a factor on a magnitude of n, would be *lower* than the exponent of that factor on the same digit of q.

But when I started tearing into examples and generating test data I started to see certain patterns emerge, and immediately I found a way to not just pin down these inversions, but get *tight* bounds on the 2's exponents in the corresponding digit for our product's factor itself. It was like the complications I initially saw actually became a means to *tighten* the bounds.

For example, for one particular semiprime n=pq, this was some of the data:

n - offset: 6, exp: [[Decimal('2'), Decimal('5')], [Decimal('5'), Decimal('5')]]

q - offset: 6, exp: [[Decimal('2'), Decimal('6')], [Decimal('3'), Decimal('1')], [Decimal('5'), Decimal('5')]]

It's almost like the base 3 exponent in [n:7] gives away the presence of 3^1 in [q:6], even
though theres no subsequent presence of 3^n in [n:6] itself.

And I found this rule held each time I tested it.

Other rules, not so much, and other rules still would fail in the presence of yet other rules, almost like a giant switchboard.

I immediately realized the implications: rules had precedence, acted predictable when in isolated instances, and changed in specific instances in combination with other rules.

This was ripe for a decision tree generated through random search.

Another product n=pq, with mroe data
q(4)
offset: 4, exp: [[Decimal('2'), Decimal('4')], [Decimal('5'), Decimal('3')]]

n(4)
offset: 4, exp: [[Decimal('2'), Decimal('3')], [Decimal('3'), Decimal('2')], [Decimal('5'), Decimal('3')]]

Suggesting that a nontrivial base 3 exponent (**2 rather than **1) suggests the exponent on the 2 in the relevant
digit of [n], is one less than the same base 2 digital exponent at the same digit on [q]

And so it was clear from the get go that this approach held promise.

From there I discovered a bunch more rules and made some observations.
The bulk of the patterns, regardless of how large the product grows, should be present in the smaller bases (some bound of primes, say the first dozen), because the bulk of exponents for the factorization of any magnitude of a number, overwhelming lean heavily in the lower prime bases.

It was if the entire vulnerability was hiding in plain sight for four+ years, and we'd been approaching factorization all wrong from the beginning, by trying to factor a number, and all its digits at all its magnitudes, all at once, when like addition or multiplication, factorization could be done piecemeal if we knew the patterns to look for.

!rant

I have about a week of holidays left before my classes start and I'm thinking about creating a notepad with password protection and cloud sync so it can be accesed on other devices.

So this is how it will work.
Probably the same interface as windows notepad so no one notices. It can be used to write a personal diary or anything that you don't want other people to know. It will ask for a 4 digit code when you open it(at first you'll see some text, you'll just enter you pin after that text and without pressing enter if you pin is write you'll see the text changes to your previously saved text and if your pin is wrong no error will be displayed itll work as a normal text editor for intruders and probably this wrong pin will be sent to you on you emil with other info). Now even if yoy minimize the window you'll have enter the pin again or even your windows gets out of focus. So you can have it open all the with out worrying.

I'll be using C# for this which I have no experience with. But I'll get it so no problem here.

Provide your feedback on this with some suggestions.

*Sorry I didn't post it on calebs section because I don't have $10.

So we were building this thing with a raspberry pi, a few sensors and a few motors but for some reason we could not interface a sensor with the pi (this is supposed to be trivial) so we interfaced it with an Arduino and had connected a pin on the Arduino to the Raspberry pi to alert the pi when the sensor reads something!

Not something we were proud of but we had time constraints and couldn't figure out how to make it work. Also, the thing we were building was just for a one time use so we thought it would be okay

Textexpander. Ggpu = git push upstream, gg. = git add ., and ggc = git commit -m "" ... I love that I don't have to type out my whole damn name, username, email and work email all the time. Just expanding my email address is enough of a win for me with that tool. Also Alfred + utf symbol workflow. And newest addition - vimium to easily pin tabs.

damn

even hacktoberfest is going woke this year

no more t-shirts

some stupid digital pin probably that can forever spew out CO2 somewhere on some server farm in iceland or something

to be clear, i'm not a climate change denyer. but it stupid shit like this as to why we can't have nice things. all the incentives are backwards. change my mind

would have been the 5th shirt too... 😉

i'll probably print myself one anyway

Algorithms to Live By: How to Put on a Quilt Cover

1. Sync the orientation of both quit and cover
2. Locate the corners on the cover and add clothes pins
3. Insert the corners 1 by one and attach the pin
4. Stuff everything else inside
5. Walk around and hold each pair of perpendicular corners and give it a toss (Full body morning exercises now complete)
6. When satisfied, removed the pins.
7. Place quilt onto bed

Now watch as the quilt gets twenties inside over the following few weeks and either just give up until the next wash or repeat.

I got my Asus ROG Strix 1070 OC today, and it needs an 8-pin pcie power connector, and my Cool Max 880 watt PSU doesn't have one. I. Can't. Believe. It. I. Have. To. Wait. Another. Day.

Me and my aunt. We put a whole frozen chicken into the microwave. After the frost is gone, it starts moving.

“Boiling moisture”, we think. Then, the chicken awakens. “Leave it to boil, lobsters are boiled alive after all”, says my aunt. “No! We’re microwaving a live animal! That’s torture!”, I scream in panic. We switch the microwave off. Chicken — out. No skin, hellish red meat, severe burns. It tries to scream but can’t. I need to put it out of its misery, NOW.

Aunt says “hold it against the table, I’m going to break its neck”. I oblige, and she proceeds to crush its neck with a two-by-four. It turns out, the neck is basically rubber and doesn’t budge. I have a better idea: let’s do something to its brain directly. I take a pin and proceed to find its skull. But there is no skull to be found, just a capri-sun for its head, with a small pocket of something squishy. The chicken keep wheezing loudly, desperate to scream. I poke that pouch with a pin. It splits in half, spilling the insides — gray chalk.

“It’s gone”, says aunt. “Its suffering is over”.

I sigh in relief. That was quite a cooking experience.

Thank god I woke up. It was just a dream.

I believe someone was posting his accidental creation about C/C++ Web Framework in devrant sometime ago. I was lost, forget to pinned it and curious, anyone can pin me out?

Seems like an amazing place to be.Looking forward to learning from ya'll.💯💯💯

Just a safety pin:

If you ever, ever find my real name and go through my rants, then you should know

no pun intended
I love my job
I love my workplace
and above all

TL;DR: fear of bricking my laptop due to typo pinning.

The worst nightmare i am living in right now...

I was noticing i did need some software in sid so i decided to use apt pinning for said software...

I configure the system, ok test looks good... I push it to production, run it on the system....and the nightmare starts.

Lits of packages get updated, and i am screaming 'noooooooo' since debian sid softwarz can sometimes break everything! I discovered that i did test my apt pinning config for the presence of the amount of numbers, but not at their value... Sooo, by accident swapping pin numbers for stable and unstable you get... Your worst apt-get update nightmare...

I hope it does not become a brick.

My pin board which keeps reminding me of deadlines , progress and goals.

Update to previous rant: My e-banking account is blocked, because apparently I already set a password on a website I never seen before.

- Tried the declined one
- Tried the unsecure one I chossed after the declined one
- Tried the pin number from mobile app.

BAM@#%$#%!!1!one1! YOU ARE BLOCKED FOR ENTERING WRONG PASSWORD TOO MANY TIMES. PLEASE CALL THE FUCKING BANK ON MONDAY.

I seriously hate this stupid country, and companies that don't know a first thing about web getting picked on government and public sector projects, sucking 100s of thousands of euros and providing the user experience that gives you a fucking diarrhea, at every SINGLE ONE OUF THEM!

Task: blinking light.

Boomers: One lightbulb, one bimetallic strip.

Zoomers: LED (D13), Atmega328P, Atmega328, 5V, 16MHz, 2KB SRAM, 32KB flash, 1KB EEPROM, FT232RL, 19.0mm x 43.18mm, 16 analog pins, 14 digital I/O pins, 6 PWM pins, 2 resettable fuses, 8MHz external crystal, 16MHz external crystal, 12MHz crystal, 0.5mm pitch, 0.1 inch headers, 1.27mm pitch headers, mini-USB, 3.3V regulator, 5V regulator, 16MHz ceramic resonator, 1N5819 Schottky diode, 47uF capacitor, 100uF capacitor, 10uF capacitor, 100nF capacitor, 0.1uF capacitor, 22pF capacitor, 1N4007 diode, 10K resistor, 4.7K resistor, 330 ohm resistor, 10uH inductor, 27 ohm resistor, 2x3 ICSP header, reset button, LED (D13), green LED, red LED, yellow LED, 6-pin header, 8-pin header, 28-pin DIP socket, 6-pin FTDI header, ceramic resonator, USB mini-B socket, 16MHz oscillator, M7 diode, LDO voltage regulator, 3.3V regulator, 5V voltage regulator, polyfuse, 22pF capacitors, 100nF capacitors, 10uF capacitors, 47uF capacitors, 100uF capacitors, 1N4007 diode, 1N5819 Schottky diode, 16MHz resonator, 0.1uF capacitor, 330 ohm resistors, 27 ohm resistors, 4.7K resistor, 10K resistor, 10uH inductor, 22pF capacitor, mini-USB connector, 8-pin header, 6-pin header, 2x3 ICSP header, reset button, ceramic resonator.

Once upon a time, I'm in the process of going to a new job. But in the middle of the recruitment process, it turns out I don't like that company, for reasons I didn't know before.

Anyone have a good idea how to escape this pit?

*My CV has been thrown there

*Creates a random .NET core console application on windows*

Alright, I've created this in Dropbox til I get some traction with it..

*Edits a few things, saves project and syncs files then open's project on mac later that night*

And some more progress, brilliant, save and done..

*Turns on pc next day and see's dropbox taking 80% CPU usage and %20 disk usage*

What the fuck! Ok ctrl alt delete to the rescue!

*Notification pops up saying Dropbox deleted over 20, 000 files*

Well... Aren't we off to a fucking great start .NET Core...

(Yes I know I can get all files back, done and done and can't actually 100% pin it down to .NET Core..)

This is my most awkward interview experience. I still shudder just thinking about what happened

When I was in uni I applied for a ‘student ambassador’ role at Microsoft. I went to the interview and it turned out to be group interview with at least 10 other people, we all get taken to a room where we sit around a table with the interviewer. She was friendly and asked us each to introduce ourselves and talk about a talent we have.

When my turn comes I introduced myself and revealed that my ‘talent’ was that I can rap, this is where I fucked up because the interviewer then asked me to rap a song in front of the whole group.

I got very nervous but still gave it a shot, midway through my song due to my nerves I forget the lyrics, a complete brain fart. I abruptly stop rapping and everyone is staring at me, it’s pin drop silence for a good 10 seconds

The interviewer then says thanks for trying and the rest of it is really a blur. I think everyone in the room was embarrassed alongside me so we all pretended like that did not just happen. Needless to say I didn’t get the job

On Windows 10, I can have files on the desktop of the secondary monitor.

But for some reason, it’s not possible to pin programs to the task bar of the secondary monitor. 😡 Wtf?

Can somebody tell if it’s possible on Windows 11?

MS Teams with multiple work accounts account swap flow:

1. Try to close the company-bound login modal 10x while being fast enough to also close the main Teams window.
2. Realize it's not gonna work, so login with the account you don't want to be on.
3. Have to type your phone pincode then accept the MS Authenticator login, and retype your pin code.
4. Finally logged in just to log back out and get the generic account choice modal so repeat step 2 & 3 with the correct account.

Spent one hour looking for an error in my PCB only to find that the symbol and the actual component of a part in the parts library differ in terms of pin numbers. The colleague who created the part is already retired.

I've gotta create a bidirectional communication protocol to link 2-3 RPis over GPIO. I have between 4-5 pins for TX and 45 for RX, so each directional bus is that wide.
Even better, I have to assume 4 bit bus length unless told otherwise, since 4 to 6 pins on the GPIO are usually used for serial/UART, COM and/or 1-pin communications (for use to get a console, not to throw data down.)

The best part?

Needs to be a Python library.

i wanna die

Fuck Intel and their garbage push pin cooler mount. Yay new old CPU.

My ++ is showing my laptop pin. Did someone hacked me?

여보세요!

bundle.js

Why the fuck does a freaking SD card reader for arduino needs a 3v and a 5v pin...... I have no space in my project and no experience at all to handle this.... and no fucking place for batteries....

Why is every of my project like this ..... cry

Im thinking about getting a raspberry pi 3 or an odroid-c2.
(Specs at the end)

Its to host a simple php server and maybe a gitlab server, both for personal use.

Should I go with the better performance or the better community support?

Odroid specs
System-on-chip used : Amlogic S905
CPU: 1.5 GHz 64-bit quad-core ARM Cortex-A53
Memory: 2 GB LPDDR3 RAM at 912 MHz
Storage: MicroSDHC slot, eMMC module socket
Graphics: Mali-450 MP3
Connectivity: 4× USB 2.0, micro-USB OTG, HDMI 2.0, Gigabit Ethernet (8P8C), Infrared, 40× GPIO ports

Raspberry specs:
SoC: Broadcom BCM2837
CPU: 4× ARM Cortex-A53, 1.2GHz
GPU: Broadcom VideoCore IV
RAM: 1GB LPDDR2 (900 MHz)
Networking: 10/100 Ethernet, 2.4GHz 802.11n wireless
Bluetooth: Bluetooth 4.1 Classic, Bluetooth Low Energy
Storage: microSD
GPIO: 40-pin header, populated
Ports: HDMI, 3.5mm analogue audio-video jack, 4× USB 2.0, Ethernet, Camera Serial Interface (CSI), Display Serial Interface (DSI)

Only upgraded a library by one MINOR version (0.24.0 to 0.25.0) then my tests going all RED! And it's google.

Yea so I just pin my requirements.txt to previous version.

Non backward-compatible library is so annoying.

Senile Web login services from 2009 grind my gears, and tertiary education administration snorts the powder.

Trying to apply online at a local university. They didn't have place for me 3 years ago so I went elsewhere but for my 4th year I have to go to them.

Because of my previous application I still have a student number. Online application says I have to log in to another portal and apply there. Then that portal now requests a Pin that I was never sent, and the "request new pin" function doesn't work because apparently my email is not in the database for my ID. My email was 100000% sure on my application, but some dingus never inserted it into the system.

Why not just start a "new" application you ask? Because the New Applications portal won't allow it for my ID number since it has a student number already. Now I either have to apply manually and pay the fee or wrangle Uni staff to reset my account.

I'm calling you, your slapdash JavaScript 1.2 code and your unhelpful staff out, Cape Peninsula University of Technology.

So i've forgot my pin for my debitcard now its locked and i cant buy food till monday because a bank consultant has to unlock it, great.

So this just happened and I am mystified as to how. When I talk on the phone with my cell phone in my left pant pocket I get a sensation of being poked with a hot pin in my leg about 1 to 2 inches above the phone. It almost feels like the sensation of a bee sting. It happened the other day as well. I did not have this sensation with my 4G phone I just retired. My new phone is 5G. Its the most random thing and I would not have believed it. So I search a bit and some dude has been experiencing some weird phone related pain for like 20 years. Of course, none of the replies are constructive. Just assholes poking fun at someone who is trying to understand what they are experiencing.

I checked all of my clothing and there is nothing like a pin or anything stuck in my clothes. The temperature outside is about 32 degrees. So nothing actually stung me. I am going to be pissed if its actually my phone. Going to try putting it in another pocket to see what happens. My hope is its my clothing pulling on a damn hair or something. But it didn't do this at all when walking around the building without my phone. Just when I walked outside.

I can still feel the pain lingering in my leg with my phone on the desk. I checked and the spot where I scratched at it is red. Just another weird thing to deal with I guess.

I always thought electrosensitives were nutjobs. Now I am not so sure.

Why does all GPU functionality need a while new language? Libraries are a thing ya know?

Scratch away the PCB trace that was initially connected and solder a wire straight to the IC pin to connect it it to the place you want

Hi guys, I'm hoping you can help. I've looked everywhere and I've not got a clue what it is.

I lost my back door key (5-pin pin and tumbler lock) the other day, and I can't afford to get a new one right now.

I tried picking it earlier, and I discovered it's got a spring at the back of the plug (which I've never come across). I lined up all the pins but for some reason it's not opening, and I have a feeling it's either got an anti-pick pin or it's to do with that spring.

Has anyone with lock experience got a clue what could be doing this? I'm at a loss.

I build a project for internal team around a year ago. QA did sanity and we released. Product wasn’t used and suddenly they decided they want to use project. They forgot almost everything about project feature. I had product doc and ask them to follow. Still they kept making mistake. And finally they found an edge case bug. Now these idiots making noise that product is buggy we are blocked. We are not able to use.
After I fixed it is working but these idiots are asking why there was bug and made us blocked to use product. They couldn’t follow doc to use their own product. They are just trying to pin blame on me and wash their hands. I was really pissed . I told there was bug but why the fuck it took a year to know ? And yes there is bug but it’s edge case and it happens when you guys make mistakes from your side then only it happens. Even if it is bug. What the fuck you want. Have you never made any mistake in your life? Go fuck yourself. There was bug but I don’t care. Bugs are part of release.

Writting stuff after while(true).

When our app encounters an error, it shows an alert with an option to copy the error details to the clipboard, that includes the full stack trace, broadcasting to the world that we are coding in C#. Also, our page URLs show .aspx at the end, so anyone using it can see details of our implementation. Not exactly world-stopping since the desktop portal is only available on customer servers and the ipad app requires username/password AND pin authentication. But still....