My views on the github/MS thingy.

I've had to explain in at least 20+ rants that some people might have legitimate reasons/opinions for disagreeing with this deal. I find it quite bad that I even have to say this but that aside for this rant.

Microsoft is a commercial company which does a lot for open source, that's a fact.

In my case, I mostly look at the part of Microsoft in regard to how they treat users and user privacy as this, in my opinion, shows for a great deal how trustworthy a company is.

It's publicly known that Microsoft joined the prism surveillance program in 2007 which in my opinion also meant selling out all users.
Next to that, through at least windows 10 it has done quite intrusive user tracking which I also see as a betrayal to its users.

I could go on and on about cases but I've made my point on at least microsoft.

As for github selling itself to Microsoft, this most likely means that it'll also be integrated within the prism network. That's my main point of concern as to why I disagree of this deal and have lost my trust in github for selling to a company which, imo, has absolutely no respect for its users' privacy and has ethics I entirely disagree with.

I still haven't formed an opinion on the rest of arguments out there as, due to a medical thing, I'm hardly able to focus right now.

You might agree or disagree, that's your very right and that's perfectly fine. Just don't say that I haven't come with an actual argument/opinion as for why I disagree with this deal.

Facebook publicly announced that it won't build a backdoor into its services for the intelligence agencies as for the latest requests to weaken/remove the encryption.

I can only imagine the intelligence agencies going like this now:

NSA director: Alright, as expected they said no so they won't have more damage to their public image, lets go for plan A 2.0!
NSA employee: Aaaand that is?
NSA director: Serve them a FISA court order requiring them to do this shit anyways but also serve a gag order so they can't tell legally.
NSA employee: Ahh, fair enough, I'll get that rolling. By the way, how did we do this with WhatsApp's encryption again?
NSA director: Oh that one was simple. There's a backup function which nearly everyone uses on either Android/iOS which does plaintext backups to Google Drive/iCloud.
NSA employee: Oh, okay. How do we access that data again?
NSA director: PRISM/XKeyScore!
NSA employee: Right, but then still the issue of how we even collect the encrypted messages from Facebo...
NSA director: PRISM/XKeyScore as well, don't worry about that.
NSA employee: But, how'd we justify this....?
NSA director: We probably never have to as these programs operate outside of the public view but otherwise just call terrorism/pedophelia... BAM, done.
NSA employee: Gotya, let's put this into motion!

I am trying to understand something for a while. devRant is full of privacy advocates and to be honest, part of it is almost taken by a group of people that call other people random swear words people because they are using a particular product of a company.

I will raise some points and will try to discuss them with other people in comments.

I will stick with Google. Since it looks like it's the most hated one. A company that has built one of the most intelligent infrastructure, the most popular mobile operating system and of course, the best search engine currently available.

The problem everyone sees is the privacy. Google tracks the search history to give users a better experience and show relevant ads. You might not need this "better experience". In case you don't know, you can turn off personalized search any time to make sure Google doesn't track. Same goes with Google Chrome, you can turn off all the data it is sending to servers in settings. You can simply not sign in if you don't anything to be synchronised.

An argument is Google should be opt-in rather than opt-out. But the general users are not tech-savvy. And yes, going to settings and turning on personalised search is a lot of work for a huge amount of people. Trust me, I worked in IT before. If they find other search engine giving them a good experience without changing anything in the settings, they will just simply move to that engine.

What interests me most if how people back DuckDuckGo. First of all, not all parts of DDG is not open source (it's fucking not, you can argue all day). Parts of it is closed because of licensing issues.

That is perfectly fine to privacy community. But it's not when Chrome is closed source for almost the same reason. I mean when you're using DDG, you are supporting a US-based company that has privacy all over its face and using closed source application on their server. Have you not learned anything from history?

You might be wondering about my obsession with Google. It hurts me when I see a giant company whose popular software is open source is bashed like this. Google has made huge contributions to open source communities. Chromium, Android, Kubernetes, Angular, GoLang, TensorFlow etc.

And PRISM, how do you know that DDG is not part of it? it's US-based after all.

I just saw an article that used a video with a title "TNW - Aral Balkan - Free Is A Lie | The Next Web" while asking us to switch to DDG. Ummm....DDG is also free right?

Maybe we should raise concerns with the US gov first rather than Google.

NO GOD PLEASE NO

Started working on a pihole alternative a while ago.

I like pihole a lot but one of the features I am missing is to be able to define a list of mass surveillance related domains (Snowden leaks; PRISM program and such) and show statistics based on dns queries containing blacklisted domains, prases/words and surveillance-related domains/words (google/facebook/microsoft/apple etc).

Started working on one based on an existing (php based) dns server which is open source and slowly but surely developed something which worked.
Then, I found out that the php resolving function (dns resolving) uses the system default, which can, of course, be google's dns as well. Changing this would be ideal but while the documentation suggested that it could be done some way, it didn't work for me so I chose a library which can do it with specific dns servers (to use as external dns servers).
This library used a different way of showing the retrieved dns query results and really wasn't in for converting everything by hand so i kinda quit the project a while ago.

A few days ago I thought fuck it and started again.
Now have a working version based on the new dns resolving library and made some other good improvements.

For those who are wondering why I chose PHP for this: why the fuck not?

Happy happy happy.

Sorry for being late, stuffs came inbetween!

I have done a few privacy rants/posts before but why not another one. @tahnik did one a few days ago so I thought I'd do a new one myself based on his rant.

So, online privacy. Some people say it's entirely dead, that's bullshit. It's up to an individual, though, how far they want to go as for protecting it.

I personally want to retain as much control over my data as possible (this seems to be a weird thing these days for unknown reasons...). That's why I spend quite some time/effort to take precautions, read myself into how to protect my data more and so on.

'Everyone should have the choice of what services they use' - fully agreed, no doubt about that.

I just find one thing problematic. Some services/companies handle data in a way or have certain business models which takes the control which some people want/have over their data away when you communicate with someone using that service.

Some people (like me) don't want anything to do with google but even when I want to email my best fucking friend, I lose the control over that email data since he uses gmail.

So, when someone chooses to use gmail and I *HAVE* to email them, my choice is gone.

TO BE VERY CLEAR: I'm not blaming that on the users, I'm blaming that on the company/service.

Then for example, google analytics. It's a very good/powerful when you're solely looking at its functions.
I just don't want to be part of their data collection as I don't want to get any data into the google engine.

There's a solution for that: installing an addon in order to opt out.

I'm sorry, WHAT?! --> I <-- have to install an addon in order to opt out of something that is happening on my own motherfucking computer?! What the actual fuck, I don't call that a fucking solution. I'll use Privacy Badger + hosts files to block that instead.

Google vs 'privacy' friendly search engines - I don't trust DDG completely because their backend is closed/not available to the public but I'd rather use them then a search engine which is known to be integrated into PRISM/other surveillance engines by default.

I don't mind the existence of certain services, as long as they don't integrated you with data hungry companies/mass surveillance without you even using their services.

Now lets see how fast the comment section explodes!

Question regarding implementing two factor authentication.

I want to implement 2FA for at least one service I'm writing but I'm wondering, next to email, what services/implementations could I use?

I know that email isn't the best when it comes to security but I also don't want to force (a-technical) users to install an app specifically for 2FA so keeping email as an option as well.

But except for email, any ideas? Anything related to Google/facebook (prism integrated services) are a no go anyways (this has, as mentioned before, nothing to do with my ego or giving myself 'a pat on the back')

As for costs, I don't mind a little bit of money but the service will be free at first and I'm not rich :)

Looking forward to the comments!

What is Unity?

At first I thought it was an Ubuntu UI... Then a C# app framework like PRISM... Now it seems to be some mobile game engine?

9 months ago my boss promised I would not be working on RPA anymore.

Monday, at 12:00, my boss assigned to me the maintenance of 13 robots.
Monday, at 15:00, I was talking to a recruiter and discussing my next job.

I
HAD
ENOUGH
OF
THIS
SHIT.

PROCEDURAL PROGRAMMING
You write a list of instructions. The machine reads this list and runs your commands.

OOP PROGRAMMING
Quite similar to procedural programming but you group your functions via objects.

RANDOM PROGRAMMING
Learned of this new paradigm quite recently working with Blue Prism, which is essentially the program doing whatever it wants from crashing, freezing, returning wrong results, sometimes working properly, with no reason whatsoever other than the sheer malice of those beasts of burden who designed it in the first place. Mark my words, BP devs, you will be held accountable for your crimes against God and humanity.

Writing a Firefox add-on which analyzes the current webpage's links and puts a warning if one of those links to one of the prism (surveillance network) integrated services/companies.

Nearly ready enough for testing (real working version) when I suddenly realize: web pages can request resources without links.

Gotta rewrite the fucker partly now.

How fucking stupid can I be. 😐

Made a Website.
What this friendly old Lady wanted: a update to her poem/song website that looked horrible.
What she got: A goddamn masterpiece considering there is NO backend and I got nearly no ressources to work with.
It took forever to put that stuff together since I thought I dont need any frameworks at all. I didnt know PHP at all back then, so I just went all out with everything that pure HTML and CSS could give me.
I even went outside to make nice photos to put into the Background.
....so, he said no PHP or anything? YES! If you wanna add content you change the HTML and upload stuff via Filezilla. I dont really want to see it ever again. But not because it looks bad.

I know, its not really coding since its HTML but I Count this!

You'll be surprised, but it's Microsoft for me.
When I started out, windows(95, yes I'm old, thanks for noticing) was the shit for me and I was quite a fanboy of it.
However, when a friend of mine introduced me to Linux, I quickly changed my mind because so many small things were way better. Then, when Vista came out, I switched completely.
That, on its own, was an adventure, but that's another rant for another time(Me and my pal were the only Linux users in the town we lived in, so without online shopping, perusing the local hardware vendors was like meeting a Neolithic tribe. It's definitely rantworthy on its own, if only for nostalgia).
The more I learned about Free Software and what Corporations could do with their power, the more I came to despise the companies I used to advocate for.
Now, it's 2018 and people bitch about what Facebook, Microsoft and their equally evil buddies do. Yet, 2013, when PRISM hit the fan, they once again ran to their arms instead of fixing the problem properly. That's about when I lost the last bit of respect for people.
And now I'm sitting here playing the world's tiniest open source violin, singing "won't get fooled again" by The Who.

I think I might change my middle name to "I told you so"

Couple of weeks ago I proposed integrating a daily process job into an existing WPF application (details of what+why would be too long to explain) and the manager suggested I make the changes

Me: "I can do it, but Jay has the most experience with that application. I don't have his WPF skills"
Mgr: "How hard can WPF be? If it uses the MVVM pattern, it should be a snap."
Me: "Its nearly an 8 year old WPF project with several chefs in that kitchen. I pretty sure I could figure it out, but that is a difference between 2 weeks and 2 days. Integration is pretty straight forward, Jay could probably do it in a day."
DevA: "WPF is easy. MVVM makes it even easier. I worked on the shipping app."
Me: "That's was a brand new, single page app, but yea, it should be easy."
DevB: "WPF has been around a long time and the tools have really matured. I don't understand what is so difficult."
Me: "I didn't say anything would be difficult, I know with that application, there is going to be complexity we need to figure out."
DevB: "It uses the MVVM, so all we need is the user control, a view model, controller, and its done."
DevA: "Sounds easy to me."
Mgr: "If you need more time to work on the vendor project, I'll have DevB work on the integration."

<yesterday>
Me: "How is the integration going?"
DevB: "This app is a mess. I have no idea how they got the control collections to work. If I hard-code everything, I can get it to work. This dynamic stuff is so confusing. Then there is the styling. Its uses dark mode, but no matter what I do, my controls show up in light mode."
Me: "The app uses Prism, so the control configuration is in, or around, the startup code."
DevB: "That makes sense. Will it fix the styling too?"
Me: "I have no idea. When I looked at it, some controls loaded the styles from the main resource, other's have it hard-coded. Different chefs in the kitchen, I guess. How far have you got?"
DevB: "I've created invoice button. That is as far as I got"
Me: "I'm finished with the vendor project and I'll be wrapping up the documentation today. I can try to help next week."
DevB: "Thanks. I think we might have to get Jay to help if we can't figure this out."
Me: "Good idea"

Two weeks and only a button. A button? I miss Delphi.

I'd really fucking love if somebody developed a browser plugin which puts a red fucking glowing banner over every website which sends data to PRISM.
Users deserve to know what cunty sell-out crapsites they visit.

All hope abondon, ye who enter here!

We all make Blue Prism the receving end of our jokes and that's actually very unfair, they even developed their own sorting algorithms, fuckYouSort, and that's something I want to acknowledge.

HR wanted a Feedback-Interview, they choose me because I am new (first job as a Developer).
They wanted the pros/cons from my perspective and how to get more people into the company.

There was nothing bad that I could have said about the company, I really had to watch out so it doesnt sound like I wanna crawl into someones ass.
It changed when we talked about programming itself...

I am a ABAP Developer, we are developing with the EWM Extension. If you dont happen to know what I am talking about then you didnt miss a thing. Documentation feels like its not existend, the language is made to be red like Text for easy use but does a terrible job at that, the standard editor that you have to use lacks a ton of usefull features, the standard functions and classes that you HAVE to use are not structured well and need to be debugged to know how to use them, and and....

There is much more, but if the company wouldnt be so damn nice, I might have wanted to go away already.

ABAP: Advanced Business Application Programming.
EWM: Extended Warehouse Management.

I'd say it was when I did a Codereview and the dev said that he doesn't really know how the code works and he doesn't quite know what it's purpose is supposed to be.
We are talking about less then 200 lines, all written by himself, this is not copied code.

I have something called “prism-launcher” in my brew deps. I thought CIA should be more discreet than that.

To everyone who understands German and is at least a little bit concerned about privacy: I recommend watching 'PRISM is a dancer' by Neo magazin royale and Jan Böhmermann

WH YDOES IT FUCKING THINK I AM NOT WRITING TO GL_POSITION FOR FUCK'S SAKE I JUST WANT TO RENDER MY OBAMA PRISM WITHOUT WORRIES! THIS IS A HUGE PROBLEM THAT I HAVE BEEN WORKING ON FOR 3 FUCKING DAYS NOW WITH NOTHING BUT HEADACHES AS THE REWARD! FUCK YOU WHO INVENTED OPENGL

I just transformed a sorting command that was seven lines long into an ungodly abomination that was about 70 lines.
We don't do these things because they are easy, we do them because we thought they are easy.

I will always remember that phrase and might never find out who came up with it.

Want to hear another joke?

Blue Prism allows you to export stuff from version 6.7 to 6.3.

However they changed 𝘷𝘦𝘦𝘦𝘦𝘳𝘺 slightly the way they store the position of the nodes. No new features -or at least nothing that you would care about- but the structure of the node itself want went from
```
<positionx>1</positionx>
<positiony>2</positiony>
<width>3</width>
<height>4</height>
```
To
```
<position x=1 y=2 w=3 h=4></position>
```

The whole project collapsed to a single point, catastrophic consequences as far as exception handling. A generic "fuck you" for no real reason other than the sheer malice of those beasts of burden who developed Blue Prism in the first place.

And I have two different versions of Blue Prism on dev and prod :)

Well, at least they're honest about their involvement with intelligence agencies...

> Blue Prism just stopped working

And that's how 12 time-critical processes in production just went out of the window for no fucking reason other than the sheer malice of those beasts of burden who designed BP in the first place :)

0 days since last catastrophic blue prism crash

Making some changes to a Blue Prism process I have never seen before

Q: Can we test these changes before going live?
A: No. We are going to pinpoint the problems on the road

Q: Nasty. However we can retry the process if anything goes wrong
A: No. It runs 5:00 to 17:00

Q: Wait, so I have one shot at making this shit work and it's tomorrow?
A: Yes

Yesterday at 2:00 I noticed 2 of the 3 machines are dead, now the process is self destructing every 5 minutes and my mentor, who usually spend weeks without answering phone calls, apparently learned again how do smartphones work 'cause this time he did fucking call.

A CASE AGAINST BLUE PRISM
Let's review one of the worst weeks I had with Blue Prism

Monday: Yay! Solved one of the problems we've been carrying around for a week before.

One of the robots suddenly became slow. Like, REAL slow. A process that would take 3 minutes per record now takes 45, and that broke apart all the following schedule.

There were no updates on the application server, the production machine, the robot, it just became slow. And not always slow; a process manually run from console room would work, a process in debug room would work, it's just the scheduled part that caused problems.

It turned out, BP didn't seem to like that particular combination of schedulation + process + machine. Moving the process to a different machine seemingly fixed that. IDK why.

Tuesday: One of our processes waits for a code to appear in the page, and when that happens, it memorizes this code. However, now it is always returning blank. Worked for months, now it breaks every single time.
After half a day of debugging a bug which DIDN'T HAPPEN IN DEBUG MODE YET AGAIN, at 11pm I decided to just place a nonsensical timeout in page before reading and call it a day.

WEDNESDAY: a scheduled process didn't start. "No sessions created". Thanks Blue Prism, very cool.

THURSTAY: This time, schedulation did start, but the process is "waiting". As in: it's 9:30 am, the process has been stuck in the same step since 6:00 am. Turns out, it blocked during a navigate stage; you need to send a string to clipboard using the standard BP action for that, then paste and click "enter", but for some reason the standard BP object sent "ORRCO" instead of "ORRICO" to clipboard, which obviously returned no results and then... the process just didn't feel like doing things anymore. No errors, no logs, nothing: just sitting on its ass. Because fuck you that's why.

Friday: another process uses a very moderate amount of scripts to work. Nothing really fancy, just a couple of lines of code to place in page some IDs and selector to help BP do its thing, otherwise selecting these elements would be a nightmare.

But

Failed while invoking javascript method:Exception from HRESULT: 0x80020101-> at mshtml.HTMLWindow2Class.IHTMLWindow2_execScript(String code, String language)

The same script -it's not dynamically generated-worked yesterday, the day before and the day after. But sometimes it will not. Why? The answer, my friend, is blowin'' in the wind

First day of new job. No more rants about Blue Prism, that's in the past now. New year new me!

Time to go back to rant against backend developers and their fucking Laravel.

First lesson of the day: if I see another select2 I'm gonna commit war crimes. You see this nice plugin for jQuery, you use it everything's so cool and modern and you think you're the smart one of the team 'cause you don't know you've just polluted an otherwise perfectly fine web page with the dirtiest js shit you could possibly find, just because you didn't feel like searching one more minute for whatever replacement for a drop down you can easily find.

You're not the smart one. You're a criminal.

Honest question: Is Jira really that bad?
Iam using Jira. It is not blazing fast nor is the UI amazing but I wouldn't rate it so badly.

That said, when the UI gets cluttered it's mostly company-internal stuff that fills up space (not only Jiras fault). I also don't use confluence.

But I see so many rants on it, is this just people jumping on the hate-hype-train?

Which privacy-respecting email provider can you recommend? It seems that the following three are the best options:

- tutanota (0€ / 12€)
- posteo (12€)
- mailbox.org (12€)

Do you have any experience with them?
What do you think about a hosted email service with your own domain?

This rant goes very hard
Love from Italy :it::it::it:
I hate Blue Prism so much it's unreal

Friday
> Mister IHateForALiving, we have an automated procedure which downloads files from a website. You should update it and use the new webservice instead.
Sounds cool, just send me the documentation

> Oh yeah, have this example of a request
... Dude, this thing has 10 parameters. None of them are named, and 7 of them are actually nulled. How do I fill this thing?

> IDK
Oh, ehm... Let's ask the client then!

> NONONONO, we told the client this update was live at least 3 months ago, we can't begin asking questions now

Ouch. How much time do I have to make sense of this mess?

> The new supplier should take charge by the end of the month, I'd like this to be live by Tuesday

Needless to say, it's not going well, but that ain't none of my business

Some hardware experts here? Looking to upgrade my PC soon, and would like some opinion on the parts I chose. I'm going for a minimalistic Mini-ITX productivity build, but gaming also.
- CPU: Ryzen 7 2700X
- CPU Cooler: AMD Wraith Prism
- GPU: MSI RX 570 8GB Armor (already have it)
- RAM: 2x 8GB TridentZ RGB
- 1. SSD: Corsair Force MP510 240GB M2 SSD
- 2. SSD: Samsung EVO 860 1TB SSD
- PSU: Corsair CX550M
- MoBo: Asus ROG Strix B350-L Mini-ITX
- Fans: 6x Thermaltake Riing 12 RGB
- Case: NZXT H200i

I think my PM is happy when he doesnt see me, because I only come to him when we have a problem cant be solved by coding "a few" lines.

We checked a rather important part in our communication services because it was throwing errors from time to time.

Asked our former technical project lead if he could help us since he developed it.

"I don't really know why it's doing that, I got it from a online example so I know as much as you do"

Well butter my butt and call me a biscuit, it seems I can be a senior developer too!

I'm working again with blue prism on a very very old SAP website. A hundred thousand nested iframes with a hundred thousand nested tables.

Please kill me, I long for the sweet embrace of death

Detaching the success of the project Iam working on from my confidence as a person.
It's a one way street to burnout.

So i were hired as a robotics developer.. blue prism, UI path and autoit. Now they want me to do backend stuff in JavaScript/node instead.. problem is, haven't ever written a single line of js. I know c# tho. How should I tackle this to get up in speed with js quickly? Any suggestions of where and how to start learning it in the most efficient way?

Soooooo, how often does it happen that someone nukes a database and attempts for a restore fail?
Asking for a friend, who happens to be "future me"

Iam very much not responsible for fixing it but I will have a whole lot of work....

Xamarin vs Flutter

I already know c# but I’m thinking it’s better to learn Dart + Flutter than carry on with Xamarin (only ever worked on the back end parts of Xamarin so not familiar with the layout syntax and the ui side of it).

Xamarin seems to be so clunky (to be fair more the dev environment than the end result), even on a powerful machine it’s a pig to work on.

Our project uses Xamarin forms, without any extra MVVM framework such as Prism and it just seems a bit shit from what front end code I’ve seen (could be the devs).

So given that I’m not sure that holding out for MAUI and expecting it to be a silver bullet is a good idea.

Is the UI code for Flutter any cleaner?
Is the dev environment more reliable?

Or is another option better, such as ReactNative or Ionic ?
(Particularly if one of those would let you develop an iOS version without access to a Mac)

I tried Appgyver over christmas, since it promised easy front-end (no-)coding I was looking forward to getting rudimentary frontends done faster.
Well, the first real project that I wanted to start didn't compile anymore (internal error from the service), the page told me to reload and try again.
It failed again... And again.
Fine with me, I only spent 10 minutes on the project at this point.

I then searched for the bugreporting page and found it. The sad thing is that when I wanted to open a ticket the server crashed. It didn't even return a HTTP error, just a JSON saying there is a error and a GUID.

I have to say, if a Dev decided to have holidays without new issues that's one way of getting that done.

For those wondering why so many people are leaving GitHub, it is due to the fact Microsoft is part of the PRISM surveillance program, where the NSA and other agencies can get their hands on your raw, unencrypted data without anyone knowing.

This is the reason 2 companies and 20ish devs gave me as to why they moved from GitHub to a self hosted Gitlab