Today, I learned the shortest command which will determine if a ping from your machine can reach the Internet:

ping 1.1

This parses as 1.0.0.1, which thanks to Cloudflare, is now the IP address of an Internet-facing machine which responds to ICMP pings.

Oh, you can also use this trick to parse 10.0.0.x from `10.x` or 127.0.0.1 from `127.1`. It's just like IPv6's :: notation, except less explicit.

"The customer reports that port 21 is closed on our FTP site. They said that port 443 is open, and wonder if they can use that instead."

"They are entering the wrong server name. Our FTP server is ONLY an FTP server. Port 443 is not open on our FTP server.

Please verify that they are entering `ftp.xxxxxx.com`

Our FTP site supports FTP/SSL if they are concerned about security."

"Customer responds that they would rather use port 443 to send files."

"I'm sure they would. I'd also like to enter our building on the west side when the temperature is below 10º, but there are no doors on the west side, so that's not going to happen, is it?"

Watch your git commit messages, you never konw when a webhook might publish the whole thing to Slack...

So, in the printing industry, FTP has a long and storied history as the standard method of sending art assets. But as time has gone on, more and more people are utterly incapable of handling FTP.

Customer: "I sent you the file. It's called xyz.zip"

PM: "I don't see the file."

Customer: "I know I sent it."

PM: "Let me check with IT."

I check the logs. No such file was uploaded.

PM: "What program did you use to send the file?"

Customer: "Firefox"

Every. Fucking. Time.

It turns out the Germans actually have a word for this:

This year's golden hammer at my company: async

Email I received:

"Hi xxxxx!

I just received your voicemail and let you know that I would be sending a email:

Here is a link to introduce myself. Please let me know If I can swing in next Monday or Wednesday to shake your hand and meet!"

My response:

"Hello, zzzzzz.

You did not receive a voicemail from me because I have no idea who you or your company is.

If you meant to email someone else, this is a courtesy email letting you know you have the wrong person, and I hope you have a nice day.

If, rather, this is an attention-seeking sales tactic, this is email is a snarky response, letting you know I don't do business with companies that pull that kind of crap.

Regards,
xxxxx, CIO
zzzzzzzzz"

Oh JavaScript... can you seriously not even increment the exponent of a float without barfing?

*siiiiiiiiiiiiiiiigh*

Microsoft's Azure team understands.

node_modules

Please stop pasting screenshots into Word docs and emailing them to me. What the hell is wrong with you? You are on a fucking Mac. You figured out how to grab a screen region with an obscure key combination, but you can’t figure out that you can paste them directly into Gmail, Apple Mail, or Thunderbird?

GodDAMN, C# 7.0 is so ridiculously feature packed. I can pattern-match inside a predicate on an exception filter. Want to catch ONLY NHibernate's exceptions caused by a SQL timeout? Boom:

catch (GenericADOException adoEx) when (adoEx.InnerException is SqlException sqlEx && sqlEx.Number == -2) { return Failure("timeout"); }

Best thing about doing Wifi setup/network maintenance for the local coffee shop for free? Putting my laptop's MAC address into the QOS table and guaranteeing myself bandwidth.

"Hello, this is Raja C******b. The purpose of this call is not a sales call. I would like to send you a free podcast examining <blah blah blah> and its impact on <blah blah blah>. I have your email address on file. May I send this to you?"

"No. Because this is not free, since my time is money. And also because this IS a sales call."

"It is not a sales call, sir. We would like to send you a free podcast..."

"... that will try to sell me something."

"No, sir. It is a free podcast examining..."

"...Something that will try to convince me to purchase a product or service."

"Ok, yes."

"Ok, bye."

protected static new readonly

// just no

I never had this happen using TFS...

Stupid Google fucks.

I finally discovered why I have such a low DMARC pass rate. If your DMARC policy is set to "none," and you send something to a Google Group, the stupid fucks intentionally rewrite the return path of your messages. This breaks DMARC alignment, SPF and DKIM in one go. They only do the correct thing if your policy is set to "quarantine" or "reject."

Google must get a hardon from playing bad net citizen.

Just created a CLUSTERED INDEX -- knowingly and intentionally -- for the first time. I feel like a frickin' sorcerer.

In these dark times, it's inspiring to see that a country as insignificant as Australia can demonstrate to us how things can always get worse.

By passing a law mandating that encryption must be broken, in secret (like the US's National Security Letters), at the demand of the Government, the two biggest parties have colluded to destroy Australia's tech sector.

This is the same government that has been whining endlessly about using Huawei LTE equipment in Australian infrastructure "because it might be secretly compromised". Now the same is true of Australian equipment, by law.

My favourite part of all this is how there will be firmware updates for devices sold in Australia, in order to comply with the new law. How well do you think those backdoors will be secured? How thoroughly do you expect them to be tested, given Australia's population of only 25 million?

How can any Australian company expect customers to trust them now?

Fuck off OneDriveSetup.exe, nobody asked you to install anything. This "i7" is only dual-core, and I need both of them to run my code, kthx.

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Can't you just…" are the favorite words of my company's president. He uses them like a magic wand. When faced with a complex problem that will take thousands of development man hours, he utters the words, "Can't you just…" He believes that if he can over-simplify the problem, and summarize the necessary work into a sentence or two, it should only take a week or two to complete.

Of course, I then explain that what seems simple to him is actually very complex once you peel back the layers of the problem. I then explain the specifics until his eyes glaze over, and he cries uncle.

A couple weeks later, he has forgotten everything I said, and the Monday meeting begins with, "About that project. Can't you just…"

In honor of Experian's "Dark Web" scanning "service."

Why the fuck do coding blogs insist on using themes with a 600px content column, then use code samples that are 3x wider than that? The whole reason I have a widescreen monitor is to not _have_ to scroll, jackass!

Lodash, Rimraf, Grunt, Gulp... I'm still not convinced that our frontend guy isn't just playing Pokémon Go all day

I love Mikrotik. Just fucking love them. I also love my residential fiber service. Small company. Synchronous 125M service. No caps. Bandwidth is always there.

BUT... They use PPPOE (seriously guys?), and the IP changes on *every single re-connect*. Also: no IPv6 support. I know. I don't need it. But I want it.

Enter DNSMadeEasy's DDNS, Hurricane Electric's 6to4 tunnel service, and my Routerboard AH100x4. I wrote a script that runs on the router whenever my IP changes. It updates my DDNS record, updates my 6to4 tunnel IP using HE's API, and updates my local 6to4 interface's IP.

It just works. My public IPv4 may change, but the /48 IPv6 networks on my LAN side stay fully routeable.

> be me, working on small addition to enormous feature branch
> build system in flux due to reorganization started a month ago, not quite solid yet, but mostly works
> f_branch gets master merged into it sometime last week
> bossman makes "minor" change to build system and edits master to match
> doesn't merge changes into f_branch
> bossman goes on holiday for a week
> no permission to merge master changes into f_branch
> linter barfs
> npm barfs
> build server barfs
> mfw I can't even deploy to our testing environment

I just had an Indian guy cold call me. He said his name was "Steve Jones." I mean, I suppose he could be a reverse Aziz Ansari, but somehow I doubt it.

Goddamn, Windows' idea of symlinks is completely broken. It's like they faked it at the UI level, but if your build process wants to copy the file? Too bad, it's not real so you can't copy it.

Here we go again:

--------
Hi xxxxx,

My sincere apologies for my professional persistence while I am having a very difficult time in getting hold of you.

My intention is to know your interest in scheduling a quick call with my Director at your free time. We are not looking for any business opportunities rather we would like to get introduced & make you aware on our full range of capabilities at a global stand point.

Let me know please.

Regards,
Sandeep
--------

In a single sentence he basically said, "We are not trying to sell you something, rather we are trying to sell you something."

Seriously?

It looks like Microsoft are back to their old tricks, specifically the DirectX 9 naming scheme. Naming releases after Northern Hemisphere seasons and repeating words never gets old and/or confusing!

Who's looking forward the "Winter (2018) Creator's Update"?

2codepaths1function

Opus is an amazing codec, but did Soundcloud really have to switch to it with a bitrate of 64kbps? even 80kbps would have been worlds better.

Bandwidth isn't _that_ expensive, even post-neutrality.

You know what's more fun than debugging a SQL stored prodecure?

Debugging a SP which CATCHes all errors and instead returns an error code. Because exceptions are scary...

the people in Ops
all have space heaters, but we
don't have the power

Seriously though, building management needs to turn up the heat by like 3°C. And install new breakers. And fix the shitty wiring.

As expected, every ambulance chasing security company is banging on my door, trying to convince me that I need their antimalware/SIEM/monitoring service because GDPR.

You guys are shameless.

CONFLATE: a general-purpose lossy compression scheme for binary data.

I wish the U.S. didn't "pasteurize" eggs, because without that, eggs are shelf-stable, which would mean I could keep them in a basket on my countertop and label it "npm"

Office manager just mandated that our standing desks would have a "cable pouch" installed at the rear for cable management. My cable tray **was** the neatest of everyone in dev, now it's unscrewed on the floor and all my cables plus the laptop charger are hanging loose, because notmyjob.jpg and contractors generally DGAF.

Oh, and they didn't install it flush with the rear of the desk, presumably because they didn't want to take off my laptop stand. So it's right in the way of my feet when I'm sitting.

Nothing that I can't fix with a screwdriver in my own time, fortunately.

Visual Studio's Test Explorer is a piece of shit.

Maybe the user wants to repeat the last test run without rebuilding? No can do. Maybe the user didn't add or remove any tests, but just needs to rebuild without running test discovery again? Nah. Maybe the user just needs to discover tests from THE ONLY ASSEMBLY WHICH WAS REBUILT? Too frickin' bad.

A 120-second turnaround (30 to build, 90 to discover) just to _start_ a test run is bloody atrocious. Especially when VS decides to run test discovery twice in a row for no given reason.

*sigh*...

I'd use ReSharper's runner, but unfortunately it isn't capable of running xUnit v2 tests when you've designated a custom XUnitTestFramework.

Using ReSharper is like becoming enlightened, or de-brainwashing oneself to see true reality. Of my entire dev team, I'm the only one who can see the fnords!

Unused identifiers, badly sorted modifiers, unused property setters, redundant `this`/namespace, redundant casts... Surely if they could see them too, such code would not survive!

Javascript is a lot easier when you remember that there's a convenient REPL that is never further than an F12 away

So since there is finally a plus-size next-gen iPhone, I finally bit the bullet and gave up TouchID. Now I just have to figure which of my faces to register with FaceID.

it puts the binding redirect in the app.config
or else it gets the FileNotFoundException again