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BTW, most PCs had antivirus, but SO out of date that I didn't even need to encode the payload or do any other trick.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

People sending text documents in .doc format... what is fucking wrong with you?! Word has even had a build in .pdf converter for decades!?

I could bitch about XSLT again, as that was certainly painful, but that’s less about learning a skill and more about understanding someone else’s mental diarrhea, so let me pick something else.

My most painful learning experience was probably pointers, but not pointers in the usual sense of `char *ptr` in C and how they’re totally confusing at first. I mean, it was that too, but in addition it was how I had absolutely none of the background needed to understand them, not having any learning material (nor guidance), nor even a typical compiler to tell me what i was doing wrong — and on top of all of that, only being able to run code on a device that would crash/halt/freak out whenever i made a mistake. It was an absolute nightmare.

Here’s the story:

Someone gave me the game RACE for my TI-83 calculator, but it turned out to be an unlocked version, which means I could edit it and see the code. I discovered this later on by accident while trying to play it during class, and when I looked at it, all I saw was incomprehensible garbage. I closed it, and the game no longer worked. Looking back I must have changed something, but then I thought it was just magic. It took me a long time to get curious enough to look at it again.

But in the meantime, I ended up played with these “programs” a little, and made some really simple ones, and later some somewhat complex ones. So the next time I opened RACE again I kind of understood what it was doing.

Moving on, I spent a year learning TI-Basic, and eventually reached the limit of what it could do. Along the way, I learned that all of the really amazing games/utilities that were incredibly fast, had greyscale graphics, lowercase text, no runtime indicator, etc. were written in “Assembly,” so naturally I wanted to use that, too.

I had no idea what it was, but it was the obvious next step for me, so I started teaching myself. It was z80 Assembly, and there was practically no documents, resources, nothing helpful online.

I found the specs, and a few terrible docs and other sources, but with only one year of programming experience, I didn’t really understand what they were telling me. This was before stackoverflow, etc., too, so what little help I found was mostly from forum posts, IRC (mostly got ignored or made fun of), and reading other people’s source when I could find it. And usually that was less than clear.

And here’s where we dive into the specifics. Starting with so little experience, and in TI-Basic of all things, meant I had zero understanding of pointers, memory and addresses, the stack, heap, data structures, interrupts, clocks, etc. I had mastered everything TI-Basic offered, which astoundingly included arrays and matrices (six of each), but it hid everything else except basic logic and flow control. (No, there weren’t even functions; it has labels and goto.) It has 27 numeric variables (A-Z and theta, can store either float or complex numbers), 8 Lists (numeric arrays), 6 matricies (2d numeric arrays), 10 strings, and a few other things like “equations” and literal bitmap pictures.

Soo… I went from knowing only that to learning pointers. And pointer math. And data structures. And pointers to pointers, and the stack, and function calls, and all that goodness. And remember, I was learning and writing all of this in plain Assembly, in notepad (or on paper at school), not in C or C++ with a teacher, a textbook, SO, and an intelligent compiler with its incredibly helpful type checking and warnings. Just raw trial and error. I learned what I could from whatever cryptic sources I could find (and understand) online, and applied it.

But actually using what I learned? If a pointer was wrong, it resulted in unexpected behavior, memory corruption, freezes, etc. I didn’t have a debugger, an emulator, etc. I had notepad, the barebones compiler, and my calculator.

Also, iterating meant changing my code, recompiling, factory resetting my calculator (removing the battery for 30+ sec) because bugs usually froze it or corrupted something, then transferring the new program over, and finally running it. It was soo slowwwww. But I made steady progress.

Painful learning experience? Check.
Pointer hell? Absolutely.

The secretaries at my university had to scan documents in the masters students lab. So one day, when the lab was empty save one of our secretaries, I remote into my machine and write a text to speech app and have the computer announce "Hello Selma, you really know how to push my buttons"

It took a while, but we are friends again :D

Visual thinker: someone who can take textual information and visualise to think critically.

A dumb retard in my team: "I want Floyd to feed me visual graphics so that I can think and understand because I am a visual thinker and I cannot understand text documents"

Fuckbug client has no brain but worse is fuckbug has not one bit of understanding.

I am a fucking developer not a fucking DESIGNER.

You are supposed to give me your fucking information. Information as in text and photos and documents that I can use with minimal modification for your FUCKING website.

It was fucking stupid of me to help you out with non-dev work in the first place. My fucking stupidest mistake of 2017.

Just for the fucking slider, this whole goddamn project is dragging for the whole 2017.

I even helped you out with taking the fucking product photo at your office with my camera so we can have decent images to use.

I stupidly helped you out with doing photoshop of those images with your product labels and stuffs.

But in the end, you fucking dare give me 1 properly designed image to use in slider. Then ask me to change the rest of sliders with similar design like that one. If you have that image why the fuck cannot you do the fucking rest by yourself and come and fucking ask me.

I fucking hate you.

Chrome, Firefox, and yes even you Opera, Falkon, Midori and Luakit. We need to talk, and all readers should grab a seat and prepare for some reality checks when their favorite web browsers are in this list.

I've tried literally all of them, in search for a lightweight (read: not ridiculously bloated) web browser. None of them fit the bill.

Yes Midori, you get a couple of bonus points for being the most lightweight. Luakit however.. as much as I like vim in my terminal, I do not want it in a graphical application. Not to mention that just like all the others you just use webkit2gtk, and therefore are just as bloated as all the others. Lightweight my ass! But programmable with Lua, woo! Not like Selenium, Chrome headless, ... does that for any browser. And that's it for the unique features as far as I'm concerned. One is slow, single-threaded and lightweight-ish (Midori) and another has vim keybindings in an application that shouldn't (Luakit).

Pretty much all of them use webkit2gtk as their engine, and pretty much all of them launch a separate process for each tab. People say this is more secure, but I have serious doubts about that. You're still running all these processes as the same user, and they all have full access to the X server they run under (this is also a criticism against user separation on a single X session in general). The only thing it protects against is a website crashing the browser, where only that tab and its process would go down. Which.. you know.. should a webpage even be able to do that?

But what annoys me the most is the sheer amount of memory that all of these take. With all due respect all of you browsers, I am not quite prepared to give 8 fucking gigabytes - half the memory in this whole box! - just for a dozen or so tabs. I shouldn't have to move my web browser to another lesser used 16GB box, just to prevent this one from going into fucking swap from a dozen tabs. And before someone has a go at the add-ons, there's 4 installed and that's it. None of them are even close to this complete and utter memory clusterfuck. It's the process separation. Each process consumes half a GB of memory, and there's around a dozen of them in a usual browsing session. THAT is the real problem. And I want to get rid of it.

Browsers are at their pinnacle of fucked up in my opinion, literally to the point where I'm seriously considering elinks. Being a sysadmin, I already live my daily life in terminals anyway. As such I also do have resources. But because of that I also associate every process with its cost to run it, in terms of resources required. Web browsers are easily at the top of the list.

I want to put 8GB into perspective. You can store nearly 2 entire DVD movies in that memory. However media players used to play them (such as SMPlayer) obviously don't do that. They use 60-80MB on average to play the whole movie. They also require far less processing power than YouTube in a web browser does, even when you download that exact same video with youtube-dl (either streamed within the media player or externally). That is what an application should be.

Let's talk a bit about these "complicated" websites as well. I hate to break it to you framework web devs, but you're a dime a dozen. The competition is high between web devs for that exact reason. And websites are not complicated. The document itself is plain old HTML, yes even if your framework converts to it in the background. That's the skeleton of your document, where I would draw a parallel with documents in office suites that are more or less written in XML. CSS.. oh yes, markup. Embolden that shit, yes please! And JavaScript.. oh yes, that pile of shit that's been designed in half a day, and has a framework called fucking isEven (which does exactly what it says on the tin, modulo 2 be damned). Fancy some macros in your text editor? Yes, same shit, different pile.

Imagine your text editor being as bloated as a web browser. Imagine it being prone to crashing tabs like a web browser. Imagine it being so ridiculously slow to get anything done in your productivity suite. But it's just the usual with web browsers, isn't it? Maybe Gopher wasn't such a bad idea after all... Oh and give me another update where I have to restart the browser when I commit the heinous act of opening another tab, just because you had to update your fucking CA certs again. Yes please!

Knowing the Linux command line saved my bacon!

I was on a plane, unable to connect to wifi, and needed to take a note... while not having any note taking applications or text editing applications on my phone. but what I DID have was a terminal application.

So, I made a file in my documents folder and echoed my notes into the file! A bit longer and more complicated than it needed to be, but it worked when I needed it to!

So, this is probably somewhat esoteric but...

While studying at university I had a "programming paradigms" module, dunno why they called it that, it was more like "introduction to functional programming".

So, it's kinda mind bending, we'd only really started to get our heads around classical object oriented programming and they throw functional programming at us.

It's worse than that though, for do they use an established language, like lisp/scheme, functional Python, or even given Haskell?

No, of course they didn't. They taught us Oz.

You probably won't have heard of it, but this language is burned into the back of my brain, along with a vague understanding of the n-queens problem we had to solve graphically (using qTk, which I dunno if someone took qt and tk and blended them, I stopped asking questions after a while).

To top it off did this language (at the time) have a stand alone interpreter? Did it buggery! It was coupled to the Mozart programming system, which is just Emacs (which has a bloody lisp built into it,so close, yet so far 😭).

It gets worse, though, oh does it get worse, for pause dear reader and consider, have you ever heard of Mozart/oz before, I'd put money on most of you had not heard of it until today.

For, you see, I believe at the time of writing, one, yes, ONE text book exists on this language. When I was doing my assignment there was merely some published conference notes and language design documents.

That's not all, I was not the only one experiencing difficulties with this language, someone in the class ended up pouring through the mailing lists and found the very tutor teaching the class struggling at first to understand the language.

I had to repeat that year. The functional programming class was one semester.

When I retook that year, it was a whole year long. However, halfway through the year, original tutor was fired and a new tutor was hired to teach the language.

He was, understandably, just as confused as we were.

There was a Starbucks and a pub equidistant from the lecture hall, though in opposite directions. From lecture to lecture we had no idea which one we'd end up in.

I have reason to believe Mozart/Oz it some sort of otherworldly abomination designed to give students the occasional nightmare flashback, long after they've left.

My room had post it notes, sheets of paper, print outs, diagrams, doodles and pens, just stuck to the wall, I looked like a raving lunatic three hours away from being institutionalised. There was string connecting one diagram to the next and images of a chess queen all over. As I attempted to solve the n-queens problem.

Madmans knowledge, I call it. I can never unlearn all that, in fact it seeps into much of the code I write. Such information was not meant for the minds of a simple country bumpkin such as myself...

Mozart/Oz... I wouldn't be the programmer I am today without it, and that's frankly terrifying...

TL;DR: Printers suck. MS-Word sucks.

Yesterday I wanted to print a few participation certificates for my blender project students.

*Turns on printer, runs downstairs, gets paper, runs upstairs, puts paper in*

So I tried to print in word. Nothing happened. Printer was online. I checked queue: Nothing.

*a couple of tries later*

Okay, fuck it! I export it as a pdf and open it in edge (8 times. 8 documents. Edge is a neat pdf-viewer, fight me). I press print on one. It works. I print the others and check: They look shit. The images look like 25% resolution and 50% jpg compression. I check word.

It by default exports in low quality. Yea, thanks for asking me. I export pdfs again and check "high quality". Open them, print. Done.

These were like 30 wasted minutes and print color. And paper.

Btw they look fucking neat. I can't show them right now but gradient text headline, project name is a rendered and edited 3D object :D

After three weeks looking for decent pdf parser that will handle all documents I gathered for my project I decided to write my own.
All those I tried end up with more then 10% not correctly parsed pdfs or require to much coding.
I was sceptic so I waited another week debating if it’s good idea to do it and I said yes.

Spent 16 hours straight coding pdf document extraction library and command line tool based on pdf.js

Fuck, now when I open pdf I see opcodes instead of text.

Got two more hours until client planning meeting and then I go to sleep for a while.

Time to start testing this more deeply as I have about 60k ~ 20GB pdf documents to parse and then I need to build some dependency graph out of its text.

At least it’s more funny then making boring REST API for money.

Oh boy, this is gonna be good:

TL;DR: Digital bailiffs are vulnerable as fuck

So, apparently some debt has come back haunting me, it's a somewhat hefty clai and for the average employee this means a lot, it means a lot to me as well but currently things are looking better so i can pay it jsut like that. However, and this is where it's gonna get good:

The Bailiff sent their first contact by mail, on my company address instead of my personal one (its's important since the debt is on a personal record, not company's) but okay, whatever. So they send me a copy of their court appeal, claiming that "according to our data, you are debtor of this debt". with a URL to their portal with a USERNAME and a PASSWORD in cleartext to the message.
Okay, i thought we were passed sending creds in plaintext to people and use tokenized URL's for initiating a login (siilar to email verification links) but okay! Let's pretend we're a dumbfuck average joe sweating already from the bailiff claims and sweating already by attempting to use the computer for something useful instead of just social media junk, vidya and porn.

So i click on the link (of course with noscript and network graph enabled and general security precautions) and UHOH, already a first red flag: The link redirects to a plain http site with NOT username and password: But other fields called OGM and dossiernumer AND it requires you to fill in your age???
Filling in the received username and password obviously does not work and when inspecting the page... oh boy!

This is a clusterfuck of javascript files that do horrible things, i'm no expert in frontend but nothing from the homebrewn stuff i inspect seems to be proper coding... Okay... Anyways, we keep pretending we're dumbasses and let's move on.

I ask for the seemingly "new" credentials and i receive new credentials again, no tokenized URL. okay.

Now Once i log in i get a horrible looking screen still made in the 90's or early 2000's which just contains: the claimaint, a pie chart in big red for amount unpaid, a box which allows you to write an - i suspect unsanitized - text block input field and... NO DATA! The bailiff STILL cannot show what the documents are as evidence for the claim!

Now we stop being the pretending dumbassery and inspect what's going on: A 'customer portal' that does not redirect to a secure webpage, credentials in plaintext and not even working, and the portal seems to have various calls to various domains i hardly seem to think they can be associated with bailiff operations, but more marketing and such... The portal does not show any of the - required by law - data supporting the claim, and it contains nothing in the user interface showing as such.
The portal is being developed by some company claiming to be "specialized in bailiff software" and oh boy oh boy..they're fucked because...

The GDPR requirements.. .they comply to none of them. And there is no way to request support nor to file a complaint nor to request access to the actual data. No DPO, no dedicated email addresses, nothing.

But this is really the ham: The amount on their portal as claimed debt is completely different from the one they came for today, for the sae benefactor! In Belgium, this is considered illegal and is reason enough to completely make the claim void. the siple reason is that it's unjust for the debtor to assess which amount he has to pay, and obviously bailiffs want to make the people pay the highest amount.

So, i sent the bailiff a business proposal to hire me as an expert to tackle these issues and even sent him a commercial bonus of a reduction of my consultancy fees with the amount of the bailiff claim! Not being sneery or angry, but a polite constructive proposal (which will be entirely to my benefit)

So, basically what i want to say is, when life gives you lemons, use your brain and start making lemonade, and with the rest create fertilizer and whatnot and sent it to the lemonthrower, and make him drink it and tell to you it was "yummy yummy i got my own lemons in my tummy"

So, instead of ranting and being angry and such... i simply sent an email to the bailiff, pointing out various issues (the ones

That’s it I’m done with writing documents like Software Product Specifications and Software Requirements Documents and Software Architecture Documents, manuals, data sheets and more in MS word..

I’m doing it all form this point forward in LaTeX... I can stay in my editor, it works beautifully with version control because it’s just text... I can split it amung multiple files.. it looks damn sexy. I can focus on the content rather than being distracted by formatting and spelling issues and the rest of that shit.. ALSO.. it doesn’t crash or get corrupted.. well at-least I’ve never had a text editor crash or corrupt my files.

Idk why I didn’t learn latex sooner and do the switch.

Stop giving me pdfs, stop giving me word documents, stop giving me paper handouts. Just give me a README with the assignment on it that I can throw into a git repo where everything else I hand back to you is going to end up anyway.

It doesn't even have to be markdown'ed to death! I mean, that's a plus, and then you could, you know, have your example code's syntax lit up properly among other things. But a text file is all I really needed!

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...

I think my worst trait is my lack of organization outside a work environment

I spent a few hours cleaning my old hard drives and I freed up 600GB of just duplicate files. Everything from driver backups and progam exe's to simple text documents

Most were in subfolders of a folder named some variation of 'sort_later' :/ oof

markdown is not good enough! the tools aren't there for non-devs and there's no concordance on moving forward *compatibly* for anything other than headers and __possibly__ lists.

md has been around for years and still no consensus on comments, meta data, css, data imports, etc.

i could never in good faith recommend to a non-dev to use markdown, even though every academic and professional writer from legal to journalism should exclusively be using markdown to write and store their documents. the data portability and ease of search, retrieval, collection, distribution, etc of markdown compared to pdf or docx is enormous. markdown is the hex format of text, the perfect layer of data and visual so that the user and the computer can both operate on text as blocks of data rather than weirdly styled paragraphs that need to be reformatted BY HAND for citation-style or journal format, or paper size. FOR EACH SUBMISSION. Academics literally rewrite their 100-page papers to accommodate up to 10 different submission requirements.

They could be clicking MLA vs Chicago and/or using a journal's stylesheet to recompile for its styles.

Today there is some support from zotero et al to take away some of the pain, but it makes ZERO SENSE for writers to have to keep and store and keep up to date, multiple versions of the same document. Git pull does not exist for them. But the worst part is that git isnt the solution to their problem. They need a compiler more than they need version control. But they also desperately need vcs. They ALL literally have a million files named "dumdum.dumFINAL-3084_lastversion \2020, this one.dum".

They dont have git or anything like it, because they need a line-by-line solution like markdown for git to become effective.

All of writing is basically mired in the fact that people cant even roll up their paragraphs and see what the fuck it is theyre saying. Most writing reads like a long scroll through some nonsense that goes nowhere. Like this rant. but the point is that markdown and line-by line editing actually produces more logically sound writing. You start to think in terms of defining ideas in blocks, ... like code.

WARNING - a lot of text.
I am open for questions and discussions :)

I am not an education program specialist and I can't decide what's best for everyone. It is hard process of managing the prigram which is going through a lot of instances.
Computer Science.
Speaking about schools: regular schools does not prepare computer scientists. I have a lot of thoughts abouth whether we need or do NOT need such amount of knowledge in some subjects, but that's completely different story. Back to cs.
The main problem is that IT sphere evolves exceedingly fast (compared to others) and education system adaptation is honestly too slow.
SC studies in schools needs to be reformed almost every year to accept updates and corrections, but education system in most countries does not support that, thats the main problem. In basic course, which is for everyone I'd suggest to tell about brief computer usage, like office, OS basics, etc. But not only MS stuff... Linux is no more that nerdy stuff from 90', it's evolved and ready to use OS for everyone. So basic OS tour, like wtf is MAC, Linux (you can show Ubuntu/Mint, etc - the easy stuff) would be great... Also, show students cloud technologies. Like, you have an option to do *that* in your browser! And, yeah, classy stuff like what's USB and what's MB/GB and other basic stuff.. not digging into it for 6 months, but just brief overview wuth some useful info... Everyone had seen a PC by the time they are studying cs anyway.. and somewhere at the end we can introduce programming, what you can do with it and maybe hello world in whatever language, but no more.. 'cause it's still class for everyone, no need to explain stars there.
For last years, where shit's getting serious, like where you can choose: study cs or not - there we can teach programming. In my country it's 2 years. It's possible to cover OOP principles of +/- modern language (Java or C++ is not bad too, maybe even GO, whatever, that's not me who will decide it. Point that it's not from 70') + VCS + sime real world app like simplified, but still functional bookstore managing app.
That's about schools.

Speaking about universities - logic isbthe same. It needs to be modern and accept corrections and updates every year. And now it depends on what you're studying there. Are you going to have software engineering diploma or business system analyst...
Generally speaking, for developers - we need more real world scenarios and I guess, some technologies and frameworks. Ofc, theory too, but not that stuff from 1980. Come-on, nowadays nobody specifies 1 functional requirement in several pages and, generally, nobody is writing that specification for 2 years. Product becomes obsolete and it's haven't even started yet.
Everything changes, whether it is how we write specification documents, or literally anything else in IT.

Once more, morale: update CS program yearly, goddammit

How to do it - it's the whole another topic.

Thank you for reading.

I hate trailing space in Text Documents.
All my hommies hate trailing space in Text Documents.

Would it be plagiarism to convert a video tutorial to a text version write-up for others like myself who prefer not interpreting my music to learn

Or would the resulting documents be something to keep to myself for when I inevitably search the same things

Talking with my dad about a program he's been working on at his company. He doesn't work on it directly, he works with parts on the side to show to clients. He's basically a sales rep that shows some cool features.
Me: is this that the program where it converts scanned items into readable text?
Him: yes but it does a little bit more than that.
*promptly goes into detail about how it works*
Basically merges documents together based on some criteria that it needs to meet. There are 5 cases and all of it is coded in sql, the 5 cases aren't coded based upon logic but based on each possible outcome of a scenario. And it would brute force it's way to a solution. The way he explained it made me think it was just mountains of spaghetti code.
I couldn't help but think something like this
00000
00001
00002
00003
It just sounded messy. And I haven't even looked at it.

Me: 😬 why would you design it that way?
Him: because it works.
Me: but the code has to be so unmaintainable
Him: well I don't have to look at it full time.
Me:... (flawless logic... But why¿¡¿¡¿😢)

To give you some context, in the past year we have change managers 3 times. Obviously our process (we were trying to follow agile) has suffer the most with all these changes since it seems the managers that have been assigned to us are not really IT people.

We are using TFS (I know...) for our builds and for our scrum and kanban boards, only use developers and QA are really using the board and all the benefits that it provides and the managers are oblivious to what TFS is. I have tried offering them training and workshops but they just don't want to learn.

And now they want us to keep the requirement information on word documents and Excel instead. I'm not sure I can continue my battle against Word/Excel...

I understand they are valuable tools but... Is it really difficult to use a tool that was made specifically for that and it's as easy as filling some text fields and click a button? Why is it so hard to understand that if you want to know the status of a task is as simple as following a link where you can find all the related information?

I think I'm loosing it, even the other developer on my team is in support of using Word... of course the guy doesn't know agile and his cards on the board are shit making him work with QA all the time....

Feel like I'm alone here....

Starting the day with Management complaining about budget and how R&D spends a lot. I start talking about the form to get a machine to a developer, that requires detailed information about the specs, proper justification, provide price comparison, fields of text which I know their departments will not check or fully comprehend BUT administration type departments always get the latest MacBook when their work literally involves little more than read emails, PDFs, write word documents and not high demanding software tools. R&D colleague suggests that a Raspberry pi would suffice for what administration personal needs out of a PC.
Management didn't comment.

I sent a recruiter my CV as a PDF file. They replied that they need it as a Word document. They must be joking, right? I always use my website's reader view to generate an updated CV by saving it as a PDF which contains text and images in accessible format. So it can't be hard to convert to Word?

I just installed Microsoft Edge on Linux, because I heard that Edge can save websites as Word documents. It can't. At least not on Linux, using the print or the save as dialog.

I don't even know what to tag this rant. Those people must be making fun of me. What are they supposed to do with a fucking Microsoft Word document? Make sure that the layout gets broken and the content truncated when forwarding it internally?

please i need your advice :)

I need to reform a service that offers legal advice and thus serves around 5000 Microsoft Word legal advice documents for the end user and every year there are 200 more documents created and published and changed manually.

So i had this idea to use a CMS, Git and continuous integration for

- automatic spell checking
- automatic assigning the copy text to translation bureaus, and get translations back.
- version control the texts and translations.
- document generation in multiple formats
- checking the text flow in the document (no overflown text)
- Checking for accessibility for the handy caped
- Deploying it on the Website

Do you think this is feasible? Can something that was made for code also be used to handle copy text documents? In my head this would save so much work but i'm no expert in CI/CD.
Thank you for your advice!

Gf asked me to help her with getting science articles. She had some page that her university suggested students to use, but had troubles with downloading documents.

At first I was like "Hey, it says use IE, other browsers are not supported. Thats bad but.. whatever". Then it popped that she needs Java enabled - well, I guess we have to... Even updated it cause it was needed.
Restarted IE, clicked download again and... Java security blocked web app... Eh, I don't trust it but whatever, just let's check what if I whitelist it.
Got some basic view, 1 dropdown list for "file name format" (like anybody cares), path selection where to save file, and some checkbox. Lame, but let's just leave it behind.
Downloaded, it turned out to be html file, not pdf, fishy that it was single file, but hoped for some text styled with css, so I opened it and got redirected to page where I clicked download.
Checked that file content - html with empty body and script tag containing js that redirects on load.

Srsly?😐

What is the best way to easily move files (text, documents, images...) Between android phones and PC (Linux)

Some days I think my hate for managers is wrong: they are there to improve the workflow and make stuff easy... but then they manage (badum tss) somehow to prove me wrong.

The issue: our pm doesn’t know how to write tickets and instead of writing short but meaningful tickets, they just write pointless text and add external documents which they should read in order to tell us what to do.

My good thoughts: “maybe he’s really busy for real and is really unable to spend time writing them... kinda hard to believe and possible red flag, but shit happens, so let’s not be too harsh.
They are trying to save time... right?”

Their solution: “let me open a ticket to grant you access to the resource”

Sounds good, right: now let me explain something... their “solution” requires opening a ticket and escalating all the way up to CTO, and so far it’s been 2 days I am waiting for these credentials. 2 freaking days only to be able what to know in a ticket the f***er opened outside of planning cause it is supposed to be urgent.

“Can’t you just give me the files directly?”
“I am sorry, I don’t have time (to download and send you 3 files)”

Managers: making the process easier.

Is there a (F)OSS solution for a self hosted document management system that includes ocr, text based search on all documents and a web ui? So far my research hasn't been very successful, maybe someone has a hint? I've thought about building one myself. Then again someone else must've already built something similar, right?