Working with a radio chip we selected because it had built-in encryption. Cannot make the encryption work, thus in contact with the manufacturer:
"- I cannot make the encryption work, it's like the chip doesn't want to take a key.
- which key do you use?
- does it matter?
- well yes, you can't just use any key!
- why not?
- you need to get an approved key from us.
- why is that?
- so that your competitors can't read your data!
- ...
- ...
- so the way to get working keys is to get them from you?
- of course!
- keys are 256 bits. Can we potentially use all of them?
- OF COURSE NOT!
- how many can we get from you?
- one! We reserve it from your company.
- are you telling me that all units within a company will need to have the exact same encryption key?
- yes!
- so anyone with our product could eavesdrop another same product?
- well yes, but it's all within your own products.
- ...
- ...
- that's not how encryption is supposed to work.
- but it's safe, your competitors cannot eavesdrop!
- I'm out of here."
(We finally found a satisfactory work-around, but i am still pissed at them)

2 hours, maybe 2.5.

No one works for more than that, it's not how brains work. Or bodies for that matter, you gotta pee eventually.

OK maybe I'm pedantic and shouldn't count breaks... But then where lies the threshold? A fifteen minute coffee break? An hour long lunch break?

Could we use scrum storypoints to brag then (I once finished 12 points in a day!) — not really, because they're not standardized units of work.

Lines of code then? Well, the dev who copy pastes Java classes would beat the guy adjusting a dense Python script, without necessarily doing more.

No, the only true measure is of course grams of amphetamine per week, and in that metric I win from everyone.

😂😅😶😣😓😟😖😧😵😰🚑

A is for Assembly, a wizard's spell

B is for Bootstrap, so bland and the same. And also for Brainf*ck, will blow you away

C is for COBOL, your grandad knows that

D is for daemon, your server knows what

E is for Express.js, you node what is coming

F is for FORTRAN, which is perferct for sciencing

G is for GNU which is GNU not UNIX

H is for Haskell using functional units

I is for Intance, An action of Object

J is for Java plays with them Always

K is for Kotlin, Android's new toy

L is for Lisp, scheming a ploy

M is for Matlab, who knows how it works

N is for Node a bloatware of code

O is for Objective Pascal, you did not expect that

P is for programming, we all love to do that

Q is for Queries, A database is made

R is for R, statistics are great

S is for Selenium, you have to test that

S is for Smalltalk, let's make it all brief

T is for Turing Test, how human is this?

U is for Unix, build with all talents

V is for Visual Studio, built with all laments

W is for Web, lets build something cool

X is for XHTML, remember all that?

Y is for Y2K, I'm tired as f*ck

Z is for Zip, let's zip is all now.

Get yourself coffee and back to the grind.

The amount of people who don't know the difference between kilobyte and kibibyte is too damn high. So much confusion.

TL;DR : Most people use Kilobyte ( KB ) and Kibibyte ( KiB ) wrong and i am angry about it.

When i first got involved with software as a teenager, i always wondered why we convert kilo to mega with multiplying by 1024, when we do it with multiplying by 1000 basically everywhere else. Our physics teacher called this SI unit system and told us that this is an internationally accepted statement. So why is there a different rule ? Did i miss out something ? Regrettably I didn't ask her about this.

I just didn't get fully as a teenager. Now, as I am a developer now, i understand that dealing with power or ten is troublesome. Due to ease of work, we lazily mess with SI system and use it wrongly. Isn't it the time we end this abomination ?

2 years ago i talked to a friend about this, he said that i shouldn't bother.
I talked to a teacher, he said "you are right but using different brand of unit system can be overkill, since there is not much difference anyways." I said okay and left.

1 mega = 1000 kilo
1 giga = 1000 mega etc

also,

MB = Megabyte ( 1000 Kilobyte )
KB = Kilobyte ( 1000 Byte )
MiB = Mebibyte ( 1024 Kibibyte )
KiB = Kibibyte ( 1024 Byte )

I am writing this because today i saw someone do it wrong on the internet, all of these came into mind. I wonder your approach about this, for research purposes.

Call me dick all you want, but i am the guy who always corrects uncertainty, no matter what. Things should be in place, correctly. No i don't have OCD. If you say something like "I have 1 MB of executable file, which means i have 1024 KB of it", i will find you, and i will correct you.

Why are Americans so stupid?

Date format: MM/dd/YY => what is this? It‘s not even in order

Length Units: Inch, Feet, Yard, Mile => good luck trying to convert in in a hurry without a calculator

Cooking recipes: cups, tablespoons, pinches => land of the freedom, especially for measurement errors

Temperature: Fahrenheit. => some dude who thought, „oh this is really hot, lets mark it 100“ and the other day „oh this is really cold, I got the 0 mark, sciene“

Weight: ounces ~ 28.34952 g, ton ~ maybe 907.xx kg, it depends

Time: Americans think the week starts on sunday, so they assume it does so for everyone else (f*** you american developer, designer, I mean you)

Football is football. Everywhere. In. The. World.

Politics: Trump, Weapons, health system, worker rights, ...

God, I hate America and their bs.

Product Owner: "need this doing in 6 months, can you do?"
Me: "we're too busy to start another project at the moment - can you wait about 6 months for it to start, or I'll have to hire more devs"
PO: "I'll just outsource it"

36 months later the company he outsourced to is out of business and hasn't delivered, and I've had their half-finished shit show git repo dumped on me.
No comments, no docs, and no units tests, so no fucking idea what it's supposed to do

I played a lot of Command & Conquer when I was younger, and I remember going through the files for C&C: Red Alert. I found one that had all the units names and properties, and wondered what happened if I changed a value. So I changed grenadiers attack speed to something ridiculously fast, and found that it actually changed it in the game!

The light bulb went off in my head, and I then created new units:
- Albert Einstein that shot electricity
- Attack dogs that launched missiles

Granted the animations didn't exist for these so it defaulted to playing their death animations when attacking, which was amusing.

That was the ah-ha moment for me that lead me to pursue programming. It was just so much fun!

(Senior level engineering course and our professor used to work for NASA. This can lead to some fun anecdotes during class.)

Professor: “Because the ends have such a small surface area, you can neglect them in your calculations.”

Student: "What would NASA do?"

Professor: *without missing a beat* “They'd probably use the wrong units and crash into Mars."

Today, for fun, I wrote prime number generation upto 1000 using pure single MySQL query.

No already created tables, no procedures, no variables. Just pure SQL using derived tables.

So does this mean that pure SQL statements do not have the halting problem?

Putting an EXPLAIN over the query I could see how MySQL guessed that the total number of calculations would be 1000*1000 even before executing the query in itself and this is amazing ♥️

I have attached a screenshot of the query and if you are curious, I have also left below the plain text.

PS this was a SQL problem in Hackerrank.

MySQL query:

select group_concat(primeNumber SEPARATOR '&') from
(select numberTable.number as primeNumber from

(select cast((concat(tens, units, hundreds)+1) as UNSIGNED) as number from

(select 0 as units union select 1 union select 2 union select 3 union select 4 union select 5 union select 6 union select 7 union select 8 union select 9) unitsTable,
(select 0 as tens union select 1 union select 2 union select 3 union select 4 union select 5 union select 6 union select 7 union select 8 union select 9) tensTable,
(select 0 as hundreds union select 1 union select 2 union select 3 union select 4 union select 5 union select 6 union select 7 union select 8 union select 9) hundredsTable order by number) numberTable

inner join

(select cast((concat(tens, units, hundreds)+1) as UNSIGNED) as divisor from

(select 0 as units union select 1 union select 2 union select 3 union select 4 union select 5 union select 6 union select 7 union select 8 union select 9) unitsTable,
(select 0 as tens union select 1 union select 2 union select 3 union select 4 union select 5 union select 6 union select 7 union select 8 union select 9) tensTable,
(select 0 as hundreds union select 1 union select 2 union select 3 union select 4 union select 5 union select 6 union select 7 union select 8 union select 9) hundredsTable order by divisor) divisorTable

on (divisorTable.divisor<=numberTable.number and divisorTable.divisor!=1)
where numberTable.number%divisorTable.divisor=0
group by numberTable.number having count(*)<=1 order by numberTable.number) resultTable;

Fuck today.

Today I was supposed to go into work and set up a dozen or so units for beta testing (its been a year and a half coming)..

Got up nice and early to get a head start on things. Stubbed (and broke) my motherfucking toe, then spilled my cereal milk on my laptop.. subsequently spend the following 2 hours tearing down and cleaning my poor little lappy. Get her all put back together, starting to feel a little better about the day. Push the power button, and fucking nothing but a tiny little fan noise for half a damn second.

With this luck I don't even want to move, lest a magic falling anvil decides to adorn my head..

The link between one of the server units and our router has been disconnected and the sales dept. has gone completely offline,

Just because of this piece of crap:

Woohoo! I fixed a huge memory leak in our app! ... In one class.

Time for noise cancelling head phones, 80s hacker music, tons of caffeine, and more leak hunting. :)

Some former colleague just blatantly commented out units tests I wrote for his build to pass. What the...

Hi everyone, long time no see.

Today I want to tell you a story about Linux, and its acceptance on the desktop.

Long ago I found myself a girlfriend, a wonderful woman who is an engineer too but who couldn't be further from CS. For those in the know, she absolutely despises architects. She doesn't know the size units of computers, i.e. the multiples of the byte. Breaks cables on the regular, and so on. For all intents and purposes, she's a user. She has written some code for a college project before, but she is by no means a developer.

She has seen me using Linux quite passionately for the last year or so, and a few weeks ago she got so fed up with how Windows refused to work on both her computers (on one of them literally failing to run exe's, go figure), that she allowed me to reinstall both systems, with one of them being dualbooted Windows 10 + Linux.

The computer that runs Linux is not one she uses very often, but for gaming (The Sims) it's her platform to go. On it I installed Debian KDE, for the following reasons:
- It had to be stable as I didn't want another box to maintain.
- It had to be pretty OOTB, as first impressions are crucial.
- It had to be easy to use, given her skill level.
- It had to have a GUI abstraction to apt, the KDE team built Discover which looks gorgeous.

She had the following things to say about Linux, when she went to download The Sims from a torrent (I installed qBittorrent for her iirc).

"Linux is better, there's no need to download anything"
"Still figuring things out, but I'm liking it"
"I'm scared of using Windows again, it's so laggy"
"Linux works fine, I'm becoming a Linux user"

Which you can imagine, it filled me with pride. We've done it boys. We've built a superior system that even regular users can use, if the system is set up to be user-friendly.

There are a few gripes I still have, and pitfalls I want to address. There's still too many options, users can drown in the sheer amount of distro's to choose from. For us that's extremely important but they need to have a guide there. However, don't do remote administration for them! That's even worse than Microsoft's tracking! Whenever you install Linux on someone else's computer, don't be all about efficiency, they are coming from Windows and just want it to be easy to use. I use Mate myself, but it is not the thing I would recommend to others. In other words, put your own preferences aside in favor of objective usability. You're trying to sell people on a product, not to impose your own point of view. Dualboot with Windows is fine, gaming still sucks on Linux for the most part. Lots of people don't have their games on Steam. CAD software and such is still nonexistent (OpenSCAD is very interesting but don't tell me it's user-friendly). People are familiar with Windows. If you were to be swimming for the first time in the deep water, would you go without aids? I don't think so.

So, Linux can be shown and be actually usable by regular people. Just pitch it in the right way.

What the hell is "4k mAh battery"? Come on guys, you know what that little 'm' means, please tell me you do.

You wouldn't say "4k miligrams". You wouldn't say "4k milliseconds". You wouldn't say "4k milliliters". So don't use "4k miliampere hours". It's dumb.

Just to be sure - everyone, repeat with me:
👏 0.000004 👏 MAh 👏 eqals
👏 0.004👏 kAh 👏 eqals
👏 4 👏 Ah 👏 eqals
👏 4000 👏 mAh 👏 eqals
👏 4000000 👏 nAh 👏

Thank for giving me 5k ms of your attention.

!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 -.-

Manager: What's your time estimate on that latest ticket?

Dev: It's literally written in the "time estimate" field on the ticket, even in standard human units like "hours", "minutes", and "seconds"

Manager: ...

Dev: ...

So we started looking into docker. As always I needed to do the research and I was fine with it.

We have 4 projects that are sold into one suite so logically I follow the microservices build structure.

3 months later after everything has been set up, we get called into a meeting. The whole suite should be a monolith as microservices doesn't make sense to the people planning everything.

Ok pulled my current plans out abd made everything a monolith. Just note I also get pulled away to other Business Units to do work for them.

Get pulled into another meeting 2 months later. Why isn't the docker containers in microservices!? It is stupid running as a monolith and we should've done our jobs better etc...

After the meeting my manager and I just sighed and walked to the office. So basically 5 months doing the the exact same thing we did in 3 weeks.

Now they want to develop other services and want to strip every method into a microservice and bundle it together.

Life of a DevOps engineer right!

I have a Windows machine sitting behind the TV, hooked to two controllers, set up as basically a console for the big TV. It doesn't get a lot of use, and mostly just churns out folding@home work units lately. It's connected by ethernet via a wired connection, and it has a local static IP for the sake of simplicity.

In January, Windows Update started throwing a nonspecific error and failing. After a couple weeks I decided to look up the error, and all the recommendations I found online said to make sure several critical services were running. I did, but it appeared to make no difference.

Yesterday, I finally engaged MS support. Priyank remoted into my machine and attempted all the steps I had already tried. I just let him go, so he could get through his checklist and get to the resolution steps. Well, his checklist began and ended with those steps, and he started rather insistently telling me that I had to reinstall, and that he had to do it for me. I told him no thank you, "I know how to reinstall windows, and I'll do it when I'm ready."

In his investigation though, I did notice that he opened MS Edge and tried to load Bing to search for something. But Edge had no connection. No pages would load. I didn't take any special notice of it at the time though, because of the argument I was having with him about reinstalling. And it was no great loss to me that Edge wasn't working, because that was literally the first time it'd ever been launched on that computer.

We got off the phone and I gave him top marks in the CS survey that was sent, as it appeared there was nothing he could do. It wasn't until a couple hours later that I remembered the connectivity problem. I went back and checked again. Edge couldn't load anything. Firefox, the ping command, Steam, Vivaldi, parsec and RDP all worked fine. The Windows Store couldn't connect either. That was when it occurred to me that its was likely that Windows Update was just unable to reach the internet.

As I have no problem whatsoever with MS services being unable to call home, I began trying to set up an on-demand proxy for use when I want to update, and I noticed that when I fill out the proxy details in Internet Options, or in Windows 10's more windows10-ish UI for a system proxy, the "save" button didn't respond to clicks. So I looked that problem up, and saw that it depends on a service called WinHttpAutoProxySvc, which I found itself depends on something called IP Helper, which led me to the root cause of all my issues: IP Helper now depends on the DHCP Client service, which I have explicitly disabled on non-wifi Windows installs since the '90s.

Just to see, I re-enabled DHCP Client, and boom! Everything came back on. Edge, the MS Store, and Windows Update all worked. So I updated, went through a couple reboots-- because that's the name of the game with windows update --and had a fully updated machine.

It occurred to me then that this is probably how MS sends all its spy data too, and since the things I actually use work just fine, I disabled DHCP Client again. I figure that's easier than navigating an intentionally annoying menu tree of privacy options that changes and resets with every major update.

But holy shit, microsoft! How can you hinge the entire system's OS connectivity on something that not everybody uses?

Our UX guy today presented a prototype of a new UI where users can declare an order.

Under the categorie "measuring unit" used to give the specification of mass or volume. He gave the following options

- kg
- litres
- m^3
- m^2
- others (which would allow the user to input anything)

Wtf why do you give the user the option to input anything. So we had to explain to him what SI units are...

Currently working on a game for developers.
Two players compete on a randomly generated arena by sending instructions via a REST API such as "unit x move in the up direction and shoot to the right". So units can be controlled by manual user interaction but the idea is that the players create a smart program that controls the units automatically. So it’s about who can implement the best "bot".

The game is turn based and the units can move one grid cell per turn and shoot in one of the four directions. Shots require energy which regenerates a certain amount per turn.
Units can also look in a direction to spot enemy units which are not visible by default.
The winner is who manages to destroy all enemy units or the main stationary enemy unit "the gem" (diamond shape in the screenshot).
There are walls which block the movement, the line of sight and the shots (green cells).

Everything is randomized. The size of the arena, the number of units, max hp, max energy, etc. But it can be replayed by providing a seed.

There will be a website which lists all games, so that players can watch them.
Alternatively a player can also implement an own viewer. Everything necessary is provided by the REST API.

I’m curious about what you think 😄

Not mine, saw this one somewhere on the internets [prolly in one of commitstrip's comments]

- make an initial estimate [4 hours]
- double the number [8 hours]
- incr units [8 days]

Confession: In my almost 10 years of professional dev experience, I have never written any kind of units tests for my code. Ever.

Yesterday I did some experiments with my lab bench power supply to see if everything was working as it should, and whether my newly acquired laptop (old business laptop from 2004) would still power up. Noticed that it did, and left the thing charging for a while - its battery was completely drained. But after letting it sit for a few hours, one of my switches wouldn't turn off anymore.

The lab bench power supply has a 250V 2.5A (625W) rated switch on the AC side, connected to a 50V 10A (500W) AC-DC power supply. The DC side of that is then connected to 2 DPS5005 units, of which one was driving 50W of power into the laptop.

The experiment went reasonably well, the AC-DC power supply was loud but stayed cool like a cucumber. The switch however wouldn't turn off anymore after a few hours. Today I've desoldered that and put on a new one, and did a failure analysis. Turns out that it was a rocker switch (so there's a little nub in there that moves a piece of metal back and forth) and that the contacts of the switch (the piece of metal and the inside of the connector piece) were welded together.

However, the only thing that I know of that causes this welding is when loads are switched off, and an arc is generated. This wasn't the case here - it was just kept on for a couple of hours, with (accounting for power losses across the circuits) 80W going through it at most. I never expected that to cause a weld. Any clue as to why this happened? It really boggles my mind, and I don't want the switch that's currently in there to face the same fate.

Who was the shithead cumface dumbass idiot thinking that notebooks should have their cooling units at the bottom. How the fuck are they supposed to get air when sitting on my lap?

It’s the big things.
Microsoft Kin. Both models. Brand new, not a single scratch. Full package.
M$ spent around a billion dollars to make these. They were discontinued after TWO MONTHS. Fewer than 10,000 units were sold. That makes one of them worth $100,000 in development.

CSS quick maffs:

Using viewport units to define font size but sometimes it's too small?

Instead of font-size: 10vw;

use font-size: calc(10vw + 20px);

This will make sure that font size is AT LEAST 20 px no matter the viewport width. Treat the resulting font size like a function of viewport width and feel free to experiment with it. With calc in that case you can achieve the best typeface responsiveness possible.

It’s not Friday yet, which means I have no excuse for delaying fixing this.

rant && !dev

Am I seriously being asked to provide the proper units of volume in a university-level calc 3 course?

This is something they teach you in 8th grade at best. It should be fucking obvious at this level that volume is in cubic units.

This day I have received the most glorious news in e-pistolary form. For some years, I was suffering in support of a client who was, well, insufferable. My presence there paralleled the divine comedy in both essence and fact.

I opened the missive, expecting another plea to bail them out of whatever clusterfuck they found themselves in. Instead, what I found was something truly magical.

"Hey Human,

I hope this finds you well. I'm not sure if you remember a few years back, we were trying to decide between IBM Cloud and AWS. Well, after years of battling FF*, we're finally moving ahead with AWS. He failed one too many times to deliver anything visibly. After you left, there was no one left he could use to steal credit, ideas, and work.

FF is still pushing to have them use IBM cloud as a "warm backup" in the event "AWS fails." We will see where that goes.

I figured you'd like to know; you were the void in the wilderness for a long time. I don't want to think about how much time we could have saved if we had just listened.

PeeEm**"

This event represents a personal victory, albeit belated, over a few peoples' absurd amount of privilege. Towards the end, I was vicious about my contestation to the insanity of adopting a desperate hedge attempt-as-cloud offering from a failing company. Some examples:

// cloud 'strategy meeting'
Moi: What cloud platform are we looking at using?
FF: We're looking at IBM cloud and AWS as a second.
Moi: Why is that? I understand you're obligated to rep your offering first, but that decision doesn't seem to have the customer's best interest at heart.
FF: IBM cloud is a market leader; AWS isn't as good.
Moi: I see. I mean, that's the tech equivalent of the company's fleet management considering monkeys on tricycles as a strong competitor to service trucks, but I get what you mean.

// steering meeting
Director: Who can we look to as an example? Who is currently using the IBM cloud?
Moi: No one; they account for a single-digit portion of the actual cloud market. Their long game to sell you a "Hybrid Cloud," which means put some front end payload in a CDN, and buy n-frame units of IBM z servers for the DC with IBM gateway appliances acting as connective tissue. So it's not the cloud at all, really.
Director: How does it compare in cost?
Moi: It's generally 40% more expensive than other clouds, and it only goes higher as you option their software.
Director: What about Watson? I hear Watson is good?
Moi: It's a brand name. Most of the "Watson" product is just a facade on top of FOSS products like Spark, Hadoop, Elasticsearch, etc.
Director: Those were words. They sounded good. FF say it's good tho so we'll believe him because we're from the same city.
Moi: *deletes Director from LinkedIn*

Moral of the story: Never trust a vendor that only recommends their products.

*FF = FatFuck - an embarrassingly rotund individual whose girth is roughly equivalent to his height. He shit his way into an IBM architect position in his mid-20s purely due to winning the visa lottery. He had fake hair glued to his head for his wedding to hide his male pattern baldness; his arrange-married wife undoubtedly cries herself to sleep after sex.

**PeeEm - the then project manager, now portfolio manager of some satellite projects. An overall decent human being, capable.

Just right now:
Management: How's the feature going?

Me: The backend is done. Here's how the front end looks so far...

Management: What?! No! Where will they input the units? What about the input#2? and the graphs?! You were just not going to put that?

Me: ... this is how it's lookin so far. The deadline isn't until next week. I'm actually pretty ahead of schedule.

Management: But what about button #2 and #3? And input #4?

Me: Yes, it's all planned. It's not done yet. You asked me how I'm doing so far. Of course I haven't finished.

Programming opened my mind to logical thinking and honestly made me a less impulsive and more analytical person in almost every regard.

Over the last year, I’ve only started learning computer science at uni, never done it before.

I’ve done units in:
- Alg. and programming fundamentals in python
- Intro to comp sci
- alg. and data structures
- theory of computation

Guess the point of this is, “why do people code, what aspirations do you all have?”
Cause rn, I’m all about “I have no idea what I’m doing, coding just seemed cool and I wanted to try it out.” Don’t know where to go

Someone inspire me???
Here is a legit reason for you to brag about what you do and what you’re going to do 😉

Guinea pigs are not from Guinea and they aren’t pigs
JavaScript has nothing to do with Java
Computer science is not an actual science
Lawsuit is not an actual suit that the judge wears
Siouxsie Suioux is not Native American
Sugar gliders aren’t made of sugar
People don’t drive on driveways and don’t park on parkways
Carpets have nothing to do with either cars or pets
Gunpowder actually looks like noodles and not like powder
Coca-Cola has no coconut and no cocaine in it. It also contains no cola nuts
Peanuts aren’t actually nuts
Watermelon doesn’t taste like a melon
Laptops are usually used while standing on desks, not laps
GPU, as in graphics processing unit, can process things that aren’t graphical
Silverback gorillas’ backs ain’t made of silver
Rod Steward is not a rod and not a steward
Guy Standing can sit
People who say they can’t stand something usually can actually stand up
People who call themselves woke do sleep sometimes
Hibernation mode in Windows doesn’t actually hibernate anything
Kool Aid can be served hot
Wall sockets can be used while not being attached to a wall
WC is not a closet
MrBeast is in fact human
Dodge cars aren’t better at dodging things than other cars
Some AC units can be operated using DC
Most men don’t menstruate
Pop bottles don’t always go pop
Backpack can be used while not being worn on your back
Watches don’t watch anything
Some keyboards aren’t actually a single board
Cigarettes have cigars, but cassettes don’t have cass, and Gillette doesn’t have gills
Dyson doesn’t make Dyson spheres
Hairdryers can dry things that aren’t hair
Beds aren’t usually made of bedrock
ThinkPads can’t think
MacBooks aren’t books
Ceilings don’t ceil
Platinum records aren’t made of platinum
Training doesn’t always involve trains
Great Britain ain’t that great
HDMI can carry signal that isn’t HD
Fingers do fing but autists don’t aut
American Football band doesn’t play american football
Taylor Swift is neither a taylor nor a swift
Hard disk drive doesn’t drive
Tank tops has nothing to do with the top part of a tank
Tea bags do sometimes contain herbs that aren’t tea
Tea isn’t usually teal
Jack Black isn’t black
Fingernails aren’t nails

SPECS:

- Dooge X5 max (worst phone ever, can't reccomend, randomly shuts off, displays advertizement, gets super hot)
- Bottle of coke light (so I don't get fat)
- Auna Mic 900-b (I used to do videos on youtube, though they were so bad i've deleted them lol)
- Two HP 24es screens (one of them broke when I let it fall while switching overheating cables)
- Mech keyboard with MX - Red
- Razer Naga 2014 (I regret buying that already)
- Wacom intuos small (I wanted to become a designer for a game with @Qcat)
- Computer with
CPU: ryzen i1600. 3.8ghz, 4ghz with boost, 12threads 6 cortes
RAM: 16 gig
Storage: 250gb SSD, 1tb hdd
Stickers: Generously donated by @gelomyrtol
Cooler: alpenföhn brocken
GPU: ATI 560 (something like that. I took the cheapest as I needed to fit a gpu into the budget, ryzen doesnt have integrated graphics units)

OS: fedora GNU/Linux with KDE as de (though i'm not sure wether i'll stay with it. I recently used cinnamon but it was too slow.

If i'm not on my desk, i'm either doing music studies, sleeping or i'm at school.

When on my deskj, I do
1) programming
2) Reading
3) watch nicob's danganronpa let's plays
4) programming.

My current projects:
clinl.org
github.com/wittmaxi/zeneural

An online rts game played on the road network of OpenStreetMap with intuitively scriptable units.

I remember the first time I was experimenting with Linux and decided to install Kali Linux (was still version 1 at the time) and in the process cleaned my hard drive. I was in first year and I hadn't been introduced to git, so you can imagine what happened to my code.

Or when I dumped all my databases into one SQL file (the feature looked tasty in phpmyadmin) and then after reinstalling everything, I couldn't import back the files.

Or last year, where I was on industrial attachment. So we were to delete some data from DHIS2 manually. So as a developer I grouped all organisation units to be deleted under one parent and wrote a python script to recursively delete anything in that group. Just when I was about to show my supervisor how efficiently my script was deleting stuff, he said, "Don't delete anything yet". I hope he doesn't read this *wink*

Fast forward, last week on Friday I dropped my external hard drive. It just works on one USB port now, no idea how and why.

My first experience with any kind of development was in a web mastering class in high school. I got super into it and started going really far ahead in the course materials.

During the second semester most students in the class were not interested at all so I decided to start a business of selling custom tailored assignments to about half the class. It didn't make me rich of course, but it felt good being the HTML / CSS god in the class.

The best part honestly was getting caught. The principal was so impressed at the amount of extra work I'd been doing that he just gave me a detention. Thanks Mr. Murray, for being so cool and not putting me down for doing what I love.

Woo!

Thanks @dfox and @trogus !

As I already said on devrant, I'm a freelance web developer and I also often sell my services for teaching, loving that. Currently I'm teaching PHP with 30 students and it's going very well.

But yesterday, I received an offer for giving another course next month, this time on HTML and CSS, for a company I don't know yet. Almost every line of this email is wrong, outdated by 20 years, or just basically meaningless...

So I thought I could do my best to translate this as close as possible to the original, preserving the wrong formulations too, just for you devranters fellas.

"Hello,

I have an offer for a 2 days course for 5 people (level 1+ and/or 2), on HTML5 and CSS3. Below, the program :

1. XHTML AND CSS2 INTRODUCTION

Advantages and benefits of change

Understanding compatibility for different versions of browsers

HTML, XHTML, CSS edition tools : presentation of the different tools

The CSS language : different types of selectors : class of selector, identifier of selector, contextual selectors, grouped selectors

Blocks of text, boxes of text

The CSS1, CSSP, CSS2 properties

Relative and absolute measures units

2. LAYOUT TECHNIQUES

Full CSS, XHTML websites demo

Positioning with the position property, positioning with the float property

Columns creation

Layout for forms

Layout for data tables

Layout for menus

3. INTRODUCTION TO SVG (SCALABLE VECTOR GRAPHICS)

Role and importance of SVG

Using SVG on client side : basic shapes

SVG structure of document, tags examples

Using CSS styles with SVG

Different integration methods for SVG in a XHTML document

4. OPTIMISATION OF JAVASCRIPT CODE

Introduction to DOM and Javascript

Access to document objects : different access techniques, using this keyword, create elements dynamically

Positioning elements with the help of Javascript : positionning elements relatively to the mouse, move elements

Show/hide elements for creating hierarchical menus

Code optimisation techniques : using objects, objects litterals, loops optimisation

Can you please give me your availability ?"

Seriously...

CSS-fucking-1 ! Is it a course for dinosaurs ?

...And if only my rant was just about the program...

It's totally impossible to cover all these subjects in only 2 days with people of different levels and experience.

The guy exactly said to me : "don't worry about the program, it's an old text but they agreed to it anyway. They just want to learn HTML and CSS, some of them already know it but want to learn more, and the others are total beginers.".

And here is the meaning for the "(level 1+ and/or 2)" part in the email.

So... Surprizingly, I accepted the offer, but asked for at least a 3rd day. I'm waiting for their answer, but I'll do it anyway, adapting the course content to the actual students knowledge. I need the money, after all.

Wish me luck...

It's just sad that these formation companies are selling bullshit to clients that just want to learn something useful. It's too often like that, they sell shitty/useless programs and we have to catch up in real time with students that don't understand why they don't learn what was told to them.

My boss drives me crazy. He hired me for working on his SDK which is game related. So I am responsible for basically everything, including an ingame UI (menu etc.) and to predict the future path of a game object (unit, minion, ..) when a certain spell is casted on it. For that task I divided the prediction into firstly getting the predicted path of the unit without a spell being casted and then a class that would cast the spell on that path and estimate the units reaction to that cast. Simplified, but that way you get a pretty okayish result. Now he thinks that is too complicated. "Can we not put everything into one class, if someone wants to replace the prediction he needs to read documentation for hours". WHAT THE FUCK DID YOU EXPECT, THAT IT'S GONNA BE SOME ONE CLASS 3K LINES MAGIC??

Same for the GUI. We only have DirectX and don't want to use a framework. Guess what, it's more than one class if you want to seperate view, model, controller or whatever fucking "design pattern" thing you use.

And then Git... he seriously said let's not use branches till release, I feel like they slow down things.. before I was there they did every operation on master.

And if it was just that..

/rant

I put much work into this, time to leave?

One more time.

ppi != resolution != size ! = aspect ratio

ppi is a measurement of sharpness.

Resolution is the depth of pixels.

Size is width and height mesured in units.

Aspect ratio is the... ratio of width to height.

Contex: Working on a c++ frankenstein code (mixture of legacy and new stuff whith things depending on the client using it)

User Story: Migration from oracle to SQLite for half of the DB data

Summoner: One client wants to keep using legacy for now, therefore we need an strategy chooser templated singleton...

Satan 666 = Singletons + Static methods + Different compilation units

Result: 3/4 of the files of the full backend being modified for the migration.

Conclusion: When will be loaded on production company will probably lose many clients due to unspected bugs everywhere.

Insert potato here

I had a team lead once that would come into my office multiple times a day to sit and talk. Not about work. Not even about development. Just to talk.

BANGALORE JOKES by Bangalorean....

👉If you throw a stone randomly in Bangalore, chances are, it will hit a dog or a software engineer.
While the dog may or may not have a strap around his neck, the software engineer will definitely have one ! 😜

👉In India we drive on the left of the road.
In Bangalore, we drive on what is left of the road !😜

👉Q: What is the easiest way of causing traffic accidents in Bengaluru?
A: Follow the traffic rules !😜

👉A guy is hunting for a house in Bengaluru.
Meets old lady who is a potential landlord.
Conversation goes thus:
Old lady: "Where do you work, son?"
Guy: "I work in Infosys."
Old lady: "Oh, that bus company! Sorry, we rent only to good IT people!"
It appears that Infosys operates more buses than BMTC in Bangaluru!😜

👉Bengaluru, where PG (Paying Guest) is the first business and IT, the second.😜

👉When someone says it's raining in Bengaluru, be sure to ask them which area, which lane and which road!😜

👉If a Bengalurean stops at a traffic light, others behind him stop too because :
The others conclude that he has spotted a
policeman that they themselves have not!😜

👉Bengaluru is the only city where distance is measured in units of time.😜

👉Rickshaw driver, grocery seller and common shop keeper think that you earn atleast 1 lakh per month if you are in IT sector.😜

👉Out of every 100 software engineers in Bengaluru,
90 are utterly frustrated and the rest have a gf/bf !😜or they are married.

👉Bus drivers use horns instead of brakes !😜

👉I quote: Bengaluru:
The City where more people know Java than Kannada !

👉Universal answer in Bengaluru is
"Adjust maadi!"
😜😜😜

*Power cuts are the only time the whole family assembles together and members speak to each other.
Seeing this, BESCOM has decided to have a tagline called "Connecting people by disconnecting power"!

keep getting website designs made in InDesign with widths in pt units without any grid and the client complains the layout isn't pixel perfect when 1220pt width doesn't look the same on 1220px. i had to make the desktop layout 1626 px wide...

The PS3 has 2 OS types: GameOS (the XMB menu and what you use to play games) and OtherOS (anything else you'd wanna load, usually Linux.) There's a problem with this: There's a build of GDB meant for OtherOS. That's great, but I need some background debugger for GameOS. Why, oh fucking WHY, has no one made a debugger like this? We have the ability to reserve compute units (SPUs) and/or areas of RAM for code to continue running when something else is loaded, why the FUCK isn't there a game debugger???

You think americans are weird with their imperialistic units [inch, ounce, yard, pound, mile, ...]?

You think canadians are weird with their mixture of imperialistic and metric units [miles, liters, ...]?

Well I think we are all weird with our am/pm nomenclature when we start counting at 12 and end with 11 [12pm, 1pm, 2pm, ..., 11pm, 12-fucking-AM]

good luck making sense of that one!
"please run this command at 12pm sharp" -- is that noon or midnight? Did the chap writing this know which is which?

Isn't Perl a beutiful language? Just check the beutiful screenshot of a function I just written...

Also this is so beutiful. Did you know that you can actually print directly from a perl script?:
$qp = new PostScript::Simple(papersize => "A4",direction => "RightDown",coordorigin => "LeftTop", colour => 0, eps => 0, units => "pt");
$qp->newpage;
$qp->setfont("Courier", 20);
$qp->text(20,20,"Hello Devrant");
$psock = IO::Socket::INET->new(PeerAddr => "192.168.1.40", PeerPort => "9100", Proto => "tcp");
if ($psock) {
$psock->autoflush(1);
print $psock $qp->get();
close($psock);
}

I said to myself, that I'll make an easy tool to convert Imperial units to Metric...
It'll be more confusing for the end user than I thought.

I think I'm reaching now 40 hours in 3 days coding a function for a nasty grouping report.

Now the report is ready.
Testing with real data I'm 3/4 units off.

Now start at least one full week of monster counting-debugging-fixing on hundred of data.

If somebody get close to me in these days, I'll cut their throat drink their blood and eat their heart still beating, like Aztecs.

I'll have no time to cook or buy anything else to eat anyway, so it will be for survival.

Eclipse with ADT. Never again. I'm so glad Google and JetBrains have put together a really great environment for Android development.

I‘d like to work more on my 2D game.
The idea is to make a mix of "Factorio" and "Knights and Merchants".
I’ve already got a decent basis with infinite terrain generation and units that collect resources and store them in containers as items.

Headsup: if you're making a game, or want to, a good starting point is to ask a single question.
How do I want this game to feel?

A lot of people who make games get into it because they play and they say I wish this or that feature were different. Or they imagine new mechanics, or new story, or new aesthetics. These are all interesting approaches to explore.

If you're familiar with a lot of games, and why and how their designs work, starting with game
feel is great. It gives you a palette of ideas to riff on, without knowing exactly why it works, using your gut as you go. In fact a lot of designers who made great games used this approach, creating the basic form, and basically flew-blind, using the testing process to 'find the fun'.

But what if, instead of focusing on what emotions a game or mechanic evokes, we ask:
How does this system or mechanic alter the
*players behaviors*? What behaviors
*invoke* a given emotion?

And from there you can start to see the thread that connects emotion, and behavior.

In *Alien: Isolation*, the alien 'hunts' for the player, and is invulnerable. Besides its menacing look, and the dense atmosphere, its invincibility
has a powerful effect on the player. The player is prone to fear and running.

By looking at behavior first, w/ just this one game, and listing the emotions and behaviors
in pairs "Fear: Running", for example, you can start to work backwards to the systems and *conditions* that created that emotion.

In fact, by breaking designs down in this manner, it becomes easy to find parallels, and create
these emotions in games that are typically outside the given genre.

For example, if you wanted to make a game about vietnam (hold the overuse of 'fortunate son') how might we approach this?

One description might be: Play as a soldier or an insurgent during the harsh jungle warfare of vietnam. Set ambushes, scout through dense and snake infested underbrush. Identify enemy armaments to outfit your raids, and take the fight to them.

Mechanics might include

1. crawl through underbrush paths, with events to stab poisonous snacks, brush away spiders or centipedes, like the spiders in metro, hold your breathe as armed enemy units march by, etc.

2. learn to use enfilade and time your attacks.

3. run and gun chases. An ambush happens catching you off guard, you are immediately tossed behind cover, and an NPC says "we can stay and fight but we're out numbered, we should run." and the system plots out how the NPCs hem you in to direct you toward a series of
retreats and nearest cover (because its not supposed to be a battle, but a chase, so we want the player to run). Maybe it uses these NPC ambushes to occasionally push the player to interesting map objectives/locations, who knows.

4. The scouting system from State of Decay. you get a certain amount of time before you risk being 'spotted', and have to climb to the top of say, a building, or a tower, and prioritize which objects in the enemy camp to identity: trucks, anti-air, heavy guns, rockets, troop formations, carriers, comms stations, etc. And that determines what is available to 'call in' as support on the mission.

And all of this, b/c you're focusing on the player behaviors that you want, leads to the *emotions* or feelings you want the player to experience.

Point is, when you focus on the activities you want the player to *do* its a more reliable way of determining what the player will *feel*, the 'role' they'll take on, which is exactly what any good designer should want.

If we return back to Alien: Isolation, even though its a survival horror game, can we find parallels outside that genre? Well The Last of Us for one.

How so? Well TLOU is a survival third-person shooter, not a horror game, and it shows. Theres
not the omnipresent feeling of being overpowered. The player does use stealth, but mostly it's because it serves the player's main role: a hardened survivor whos a capable killer, struggling through a crapsack world. The similarity though comes in with the boss battles against the infected.

The enemy in these fights is almost unstoppable, they're a tank, and the devs have the player running from them just to survive. Many players cant help but feel a little panic as they run for their lives, especially with the superbly designed custom death scenes for joel. The point is, mechanics are more of a means to an end, and if games are paintings, and mechanics are the brushes, player behavior is the individual strokes and player emotion is the color. And by examining TLOU in this way, it becomes obvious that while its a third person survival shooter, the boss fights are *overtones* of Alien: Isolation.

And we can draw that comparison because like bach, who was deaf, and focused on the keys and not the sound, we're focused on player behavior and not strictly emotions.

I'm so sick of "senior/lead" developers pretending they know how to write tests and ending up with these unmaintainable test suites, full of repetitions and incomprehensible assertions.

You should take some time to learn from your mistakes instead of just continuing to write the same shitty tests as usual!!!

Every time I arrive at a new team I spend weeks just trying to understand the test suites for what should be fairly SIMPLE applications!

UNIT TESTS SHOULD TEST UNITS OF CODE!
If your unit test tests seem to be repetitive, they are not unit tests. Repetition is expected in integration tests, but that is why those are usually DATA DRIVEN tests!!!

Proper rant tonight... I was getting an upgrade to my home entertainment today. It needed an engineer visit. What a useless clown he turned out to be.

2 hrs after arriving, he left and things weren't working remotely right at all. But it was Saturday and he was off the clock so I had to suck it up. No option to back out either - it was all activated and I had to accept it.

He spent most of the time arguing with me about my home network was set up and how it was wrong and how it was important for the overall system to work. Being a geek and having done research, I couldn't understand this - that wasn't how it was meant to be, I knew. I accept my home wiring is a bit odd, but I've had a working system for years because it's all necessary.

After all the faffing about and purchase of some new powerline units (which I accept I needed anyway but where unrelated to this set up), looking more into it myself, it is now up and running correctly.

I am thoroughly pissed at the ineptitude of the engineer. He clearly doesn't understand how the system works. He doesn't understand how powerline works and how it's a life saver for people with awkwardly shaped houses or thick walls where Wi-Fi is useless. If he had, we would have had far fewer issues and I wouldn't have had the stress of thinking I'd killed our home entertainment and internet and there was nothing I could do about it.

I don't blame the provider (besides them clearly not providing adequate training). But this was arrogant uselessness. At least I had the knowledge to understand how it was meant to work and get it sorted myself.

Maybe it could be a useful sideline job if I get fed up with developing.

Why are there people that still don't use the metric system? It is so stupid and cost so much.
We formally adopted the metric system about 150 years ago. Why are systems that where developed 100 years later still based on stupid units that are based human body parts that differ between each person?

semi dev related(later half)
A common and random thought I have:

A lot of units that humans use are either needlessly arbitrary or based on something weird. Like Fahrenheit. That shit is weird! 0°F is the freezing point of a water and salt solution. What a weird fucking thing to use!

But also, I like Fahrenheit more. Probably because it's what I was raised with and switching is tedious (though I'm trying. I'd like to use metric more), but also because one degree F is a smaller, more precise change. You can describe more accuracy without decimals.

On the other hand I prefer metric for length. Centimeters, and centimeters are way more precise and way less confusing than inches and .... 1/8th inches? Who the fuck decided on 1/8ths?!

Which brings me to my common thought:

If you look at a Unix timestamp, you can approximate somewhat when it happened. Knowing the current timestamp and a few reference points you can see RELATIVELY what a epoch stamp translates to. A few days ago, an hr ago, 2014ish.

This leads me to think that if we actually taught from a young age to think in epoch as a unit (not as a replacement to normal date formats but as a secondary at first) that we could just naturally read epoch time in the same manner we read dates like "28/01/2006 14:24:10 UTC"

In your brain you automatically know how old you were when that timestamp happened. What grade/job and where you lived at the time. What season it was. You know how far into the day it was, a little before lunch (or after or whatever, your time zone will vary). Now try with 1138458250. I can usually get roughly the year, and month if I really think about it, but that's it. And it takes much more effort

I'm sure there's other units we could benefit from but epoch is the one that usually brings this to mind for me.

To me this is one of the most interesting topics. I always dream about creating the perfect programming class (not aimed at absolute beginners though, in the end there should be some usable software artifact), because I had to teach myself at least half of the skills I need everyday.

The goal of the class, which has at least to be a semester long, is to be able to create industry-ready software projects with a distributed architecture (i.e. client-server).

The important thing is to have a central theme over the whole class. Which means you should go through the software lifecycle at least once.

Let's say the class consists of 10 Units à ~3 hours (with breaks ofc) and takes place once a week, because that is the absolute minimum time to enable the students to do their homework.

1. Project setup, explanation of the whole toolchain. Init repositories, create SSH keys for github/bitbucket, git crash course (provide a cheat sheet).
Create a hello world web app with $framework. Run the web server, let the students poke around with it. Let them push their projects to their repositories.
The remainder of the lesson is for Q&A, technical problems and so on.

Homework: Read the docs of $framework. Do some commits, just alter the HTML & CSS a bit, give them your personal touch.
For the homework, provide a $chat channel/forum/mailing list or whatever for questions where not only the the teacher should help, but also the students help each other.

2. Setup of CI/Build automation. This is one of the hardest parts for the teacher/uni because the university must provide the necessary hardware for it, which costs money. But the students faces when they see that a push to master automatically triggers a build and deploys it to the right place where they can reach it from the web is priceless.
This is one recurring point over the whole course, as there will be more software artifacts beside the web app, which need to be added to the build process. I do not want to go deeper here, whether you use Jenkins, or Travis or whatev and Ansible or Puppet or whatev for automation. You probably have some docker container set up for this, because this is a very tedious task for initial setup, probably way out of proportion. But in the end there needs to be a running web service for every student which they can reach over a personal URL. Depending on the students interest on the topic it may be also better to setup this already before the first class starts and only introduce them to all the concepts in a theory block and do some more coding in the second half.

Homework: Use $framework to extend your web app. Make it a bit more user interactive with buttons, forms or the like. As we still have no backend here, you can output to alert or something.

3. Create a minimal backend with $backendFramework. Only to have something which speaks with the frontend so you can create API calls going back and forth. Also create a DB, relational or not. Discuss DB schema/model and answer student questions.

Homework: Create a form which gets transformed into JSON and sent to the backend, backend stores the user information in the DB and should also provide a query to view the entry.

4. Introduce mobile apps. As it would probably too much to introduce them both to iOS and Android, something like React Native (or whatever the most popular platform-agnostic framework is then) may come in handy. Do the same as with the minimal web app and add the build artifacts to CI. Also talk about getting software to the app/play store (a common question) and signing apps.

Homework: Use the view API call from the backend to show the data on the mobile. Play around with the mobile project to display it in a nice way.

5. Introduction to refactoring (yes, really), if we are really talking about JS here, mention things like typescript, flow, elm, reason and everything with types which compiles to JS. Types make it so much easier to refactor growing codebases and imho everybody should use it.
Flowtype would make it probably easier to get gradually introduced in the already existing codebase (and it plays nice with react native) but I want to be abstract here, so that is just a suggestion (and 100% typed languages such as ELM or Reason have so much nicer errors).
Also discuss other helpful tools like linters, formatters.

Homework: Introduce types to all your API calls and some important functions.

6. Introduction to (unit) tests. Similar as above.
Homework: Write a unit test for your form.

(TBC)

I'm generally new to front end development, couldn't keep up with the eco system even if I wanted to.

But what the fuck am I supposed to do when UX gives me mock ups in absolute units of pixels?

I thought best practice was for development was like vw viewport units of em units, because of the wrinkle of supporting different screen sizes and devices.

Is the general industry practice I'm supposed to use their general ratios and just get close enough? Like I don't want to dick around for diminishing returns trying to get shit pixel perfect, I don't have an eye for this shit to begin with.

My family literally knows nothing about development, programming, computer science. It's bad. The closest anyone in my family has come to understanding is a distant cousin, who is an IT lead in Healthcare. His mother told him to call me because some fucking piece of shit at his job purposefully mucked up an internal ASP.net app on his way out. Sure, I had nothing better to do than to phone debug your shitty app with zero context. Great.

My wife is the one who comes closest to understanding in my immediate family* but even she admits when I come home ranting that she has absolutely zero idea what I'm saying.

It great though because I get to use her as a living rubber duck that just stares at me with a blank expression. Then at the end of describing a complex problem I'm trying to sort out she just replies with some encouraging thing like, "I'm certain you'll figure it out."

Fuck this is a long rant. Sorry. I better get back to work.

Just found out the API of our zentracloud sensors is sending the units with a space before the actual unit. Couldn't figure out for half an hour why Doctrine is not finding the unit in the database. Encoding? JSON decoding? Character itself? Screw you. Screw you...

I feel sad to say this but...

I'm hyped for the pixel 4, currently rocking my 6th pixel 2 XL (fuck these screens and camera units) and the pixel 3 was just all levels of no from the notch, incremental upgrade status and just a phone following the trends.

Looking at the leaks and official confirmations of the pixel 4 actually have me keen for photography (I do prefer a DLSR or straight up film unit but a good in the moment camera is amazing), performance and lack of notch just have me keen...

Forgive me father for I have sinned

Any other language: Hey fuckface, you can't name this variable by a single letter, tf is wrong with you? use some descriptive shit.

Golang: lmao fuck u

I really find it interesting how we use short variable names for items in golang. Kinda makes sense when you think of it. Most of these items come up in short methods for which the mental model lets you know and remember what you are doing, they even make sense when going through the std lib in which that shit is all over the place. YET years of going by other languages has made me squint my eyes a bit in frustration every time I see it.
Say for example that a function is implementing io.Writer. What would you call the method parameter? you could argue that writer would be sensible since it has it in the signature, but what about when the io.Writer in itself is a file or a socket or whatever? writer would be funny or strange? nah fuck it just w, it makes sense, but x wouldn't. I find these points to make sense even if i don't like them.

Would, now, this practice be acceptable in C? you are supposed to write the same modular code with C in which you compose large functionality in separated units of code, yet I am sure this practice of single name variables is something that C engineers dislike greatly.

Are go devs just doing this out of blind love for their preference in languages? and how would this work if mfkers add generics to go(I hope not, Go is simple enough to understand in order to extend functionality through the empty interface, but that is a preference of mine as well)

The more I use Go the more I like it to be honest, I think the code looks ugly syntactically, but that is subjective as all hell and based on my constant preference for a language to look like Ruby, which even though it might not be everyone's cup of tea it remains to my eyes as the most beautiful language in existence, again, an obvious personal preference.

As of two days ago, I no longer use systemd on my Arch system, I switched to openRC.

Basically it all started right around 9 months ago, installed Arch on a new laptop, and whenever I would reboot (which was never very often, mainly kernel upgrades), about 7 out of 10 times it would crash when booting up. My solution for a while was "just don't reboot then".

I spent a while trying to figure out exactly what was causing the boots to fail. I tried disabling systemd units, just trying to narrow it down. I even got the logs from each failed boot, comparing it to a successful boot to find any differences just to have some idea of what the issue was.

One day I figured, it's possible that it could be an issue with systemd itself. So on my day off of work, I figured I'd try using a different init system, just to see if it would work 10 out of 10 times. Decided to try openRC, and sure enough, IT FUCKING WORKS!

Now, I don't hate systemd, I've always been on the fence about it. I feel like it just tries to do too much. I will say, it is fairly convenient to have a lot of things running off of one component, making them all compatible, BUT there's also the factor that one issue could potentially fuck shit up.

Hell, I'll say that it is easier to use systemd than openRC. Enabling unit files is easy as shit in systemd. But I personally like a challenge, and to learn new things, that's part of why I use Arch.

Anyways, I'm done with my rambling for today.

So I got this thing about getting multiple units of things I like for some time. practical examples:

- Got a tattoo, then I got later 4 more(but I think getting more tattoos is pretty standard)
- got one pencil, then I bought 8 more and a can to store then
- Bought a mouse, then now I got 3. (all of them are microsoft it's one of the few things I like from MS)
- Got a laptop sleeve, I got 3 now
- Got a keychain for my car keys, now I have 6
- I got a piercing, then I got 10 more(eyebrows, ears, nose, tongue, mouth). But I removed most of them, a pain in the ass to clean all those jewels
... list goes on

I haven't been with a psychologist, but I'm guessing that could be some obsession/compulsion or I'm just pretty standard and this is kind of normal. Anyone can relate?

My first memories of the very first computer i got?

Not sure exactly when that was but all the first memories are of me playing games:

Some paper plane game on the really old macs (giant screens i think it was highlighter orange)

My auntie also had a computer when i was little i'd visit her for the holidays and j played some kid game about dogs.

When we got our first computer i remember some 2d metroid like game but it was where you play as some lady with a whip.

Also duke nukem 1, one of the games me and my dad played together.

Then later on we got a win98 computer i played age of empires and solitaire!

(i used to ride around on my bike with a sword pretending i was a cataphract LOL, i was never very good at RTS games when i was little so i'd build things and not have room for units to move, i kept building houses thinking you need a lot lol, me and the AI were at a stalemate, most because the buildings were in the way)

I remember my teacher giving me tips about age of empires when i was in primary, one of my favourite teachers too.

Good times

TIL that decibel units were named after Alexander Graham Bell and introduced by Bell Labs

The endless argument I remember from my old job:

Putting service units files in /etc/systemd/system/ or in /usr/lib/systemd/system

Working with Yelp API.
Had a working method to return Restaurant List in a separate project.
Moved that code to a new project.
Spent 3 hours trying to figure out why the tried and true method was returning an empty list.
I forgot I had also made a helper method in that other project to turn km into meters.
Instead of searching a 5km radius, I was searching a 5 meter radius...

(Prior to that I mixed up my longitude and latitude, and searched for pizza places in the antarctic. Spoiler: There are none.)

In last episode of "How SystemD screwed me over", we talked about Systemd's PrivateTMP and how it stopped me from generating SSL certificates.

In today's episode - SystemD vs CGroups!

Mister Pottering and his team apparently felt that CGroups are underused (As they can be quite difficult to set up), and so decided to integrate them into SystemD by default. As well as to provide a friendlier interface to control their values.

One can read about these interactions in the manual page "systemd.resource-control"

All is cool so far. So what happened to me today?

Imagine you did a major system release upgrade of a production server, previously tested on a standalone server. This upgrade doesn't only upgrade the distribution however, it also includes the switch from SysVInit to SystemD. Still, everything went smooth before, nothing to worry now then, right? Wrong.

The test server was never properly stress-tested. This would prove to be an issue.

When the upgrade finishes, it is 4 AM. I am happy to go to bed at last. At 6 AM, however, I am woken up again as the server's webservices are unavailable, and the machine is under 100% CPU load. Weird, I check htop and see that Apache now eats up all 32 virtual cores. So I restart it, casting it off to some weird bug or something as the load returns to normal.

2 hours later, however, the same situation occurs. This time, I scour all the logs I can, and find something weird - Many mentions that Apache couldn't create a worker thread? That's weird.

Several hours of research and tinkering later, I found out the following:
1 - By default, all processes of a system that runs SystemD are part of several CGroups. One of these CGroups is the PID CGroup, meant to stop a runaway process from exhausting all PIDs/TIDs of a system.

This limit is, by default, set to a certain amount of the total available PIDs. If a process exhausts this limit, it can no longer perform operations like fork().

So now, I know the how and why, but how should I solve this? The sanest option would be to get a rough estimate of just how many threads the Apache webserver might need. This option, though, is harder, than apparent. I cannot just take the MaxRequestsWorkers number... The instance has roughly double the amount of threads already. The cause being, as I found out, the HTTP/2 module, which spawns additional threads that do not count towards this limit. So I have no idea what limit to set.

Or I could... Disable the limit for just the webserver via the TasksAccounting switch. I thought this would work. And it did seem to... Until I ran out of TIDs again - Although systemctl status apache2.service no longer reported the number of tasks or a task limit of the process, the PID CGroup stayed set to the previous limit. Later I found out that I can only really disable the Task Accounting for all the units of a given slice and its parents.

This, though, systemctl somewhat didn't make apparent (And I skimmed the manual, that part was my fault)

So... The only remaining option I had was to... Just set the limit to infinite. And that worked, at last.

It took me several hours to debug this issue. And I once again feel like uninstalling systemd again, in favor of sysvinit.

What did I learn? RTFM, carefully, everything is important, it is not enough to read *half* the paragraph of a given configuration option...

Oh, and apache + http/2 = huge TID sink.

I'm a computer science student who is finishing up a year long internship tomorrow, based in Melbourne Australia. I'm going into my final year now and have been looking into other software engineering jobs to do alongside studies.

I have been fortunate enough to be offered a full-time position, leaving me with the decision of putting studies on hold (temporarily or indefinitely) in order to take this job, or to decline and continue with my studies.

Wondering if anyone has been in a similar situation or can give some insights into having a degree vs real world experience.

Some additional info:

From my internship I have a year of commercial/industry experience from a large multinational company.

I have 6 units left on my degree (4 in semester 1 and 2 in semester 2).

The job I have been offered has growth potential and job security. The salary offered is also higher than what I expected.

Let me know what you all think.

So to give you a feel for what evil, clusterfuck code it was in: this projects largest part was coded by a maniac, witty physicist confined in the factory for a month, intended as a 'provisional' solution of course it ran for years. The style was like C with a bit of classes.. and a big chunk of shared memory as a global mud of storage, communication and catastrophe. Optimistic or no locking of the memory between process barriers, arrays with self implemented boundary checks that would give you the zeroth element on failure and write an error log of which there were often dozens in the log. But if that sounds terrifying already, it is only baseline uneasyness which was largely surpassed by the shear mass of code, special units, undocumented madness. And I had like three month to write a simulator of the physical factory and sensors to feed that behemoth with the 'right' inputs. Still I don't know how I stood it through, but I resigned little time afterwards.

Well, lastly to the bug: there was some central map in that shared memory that hold like view of the central customer data. And somehow - maybe not that surprisingly giving the surrounding codebase - it sometimes got corrupted. Once in a month or two times a day. Tried to put in logging, more checks - but never really could pinpoint the problem... Till today I still get the haunting feeling of a luring memory corruption beneath my feet, if I get closer to the metal core of pure C.

It's a good intention if you want to separate your code in logical units and split it into multiple methods, but could you please stop handing the control flow through about 20 methods before even really starting with the actual logic? This mess is 10 times as long as it needs to be, because someone decided to make everything go through 10 "validate one little thing" methods for every method with actual logic!
Edit: DevRant didn't allow me to post first, now I've analysed the code a bit more and the control flow actually goes out of a specialised class into a generalised class and back (not by returning, but by calling the specialised class from the general one) and the parameter that says what specialised class to call gets written into a class variable, then read from there and passed as a method argument, then back into another class variable, then the code changes it up a bit as a local variable, then passses it as a method parameter again... First it seemed like it knew what class to call using black magic, but no, it actually just hid the fact really well that it did in fact pass the class reference through in multiple forms from beginning to end.

Itd be cool if we could get something like Schenzen.Io going, but you build the chips from the gates up
Maybe package them into modular units, and connect those at a higher level or abstraction, ad infinitum.

Then add access to virtual LCD output, and other peripherals, or even map output to real hardware, essentially letting you build near bare-metal virtual machines.

Dont know about that last part, but the closest I've seen to the rest is circuit simulator and again, schenzen.

On the machine learning front I figured out I need about ten times as many training samples as validation samples, or vice versa. I'll have to check my notes. Explains why I could get training loss below 2.11

Also, I'm looking at grouping digits, and trying different representations. I'm looking at the hidden variables for primorials to see what that reveals. And I realized because of the amount of configurations and training that I want to do, even a personally built cloud isnt going to be sufficient. I'm gonna have to rent someone else's hardware and run it "in duh cloud."

Any good providers that are ridiculously upfront for beginners to get started with? Namely something cheapish.

you know what annoys me about this situation the most ?

noone is living an ideal life
in any sense
except a few

but that being said, living less than ideal life if people had not wasted so much time, would have led to certain things becoming better.

example.

if i was out of development work, and had to take a crap job.

and lets say that ended up putting me in a financially unstable situation.

if i had rotten teeth, i could work part time, go to a sliding scale place and fix them one by one
while either educating myself further or looking for a better job because in truth, if i'm accepting a part time job, i must be fucked.

i don't see any longevity in an intensely physical job, I see an early death.

there are not enough paying people to ensure everyone has a skilled job, and truthfully not everyone can, but we have more people than we need to do the unskilled and skilled jobs both so why are we not running with that ?

the best time to do unskilled labor or just labor jobs period is when a person is young and there body is new.

and then not for long or with accommodation considering throwing your back out or fucking up your knees stays with you for life.

everything is so backwards in this country.

people think in terms so frequently these days in 'how can i make someone else suffer for my amusement and see their potential diminished so i feel better about my fucked up pathetic life ?'

or

'how can i get revenge against a person that doesn't deserve it'

or

'how can i ensure other people are totally boned so my charmed life i don't deserve seems satisfying'

its pretty gross as are these people

well fast forward years later and life appears fairly repetitive for alot of people

took a very large of detours here, had some fun, experienced some fucked up horros, saw a few wonders which were mostly based off my ideas, and some that were not.

still i return to what is to be done about our unfair, wasteful system ?

I've always been a fan of removing people's 'excuses' to neglect their children for example.
and definitely blocking all avenues of abuse.
even unintended, or pretended to be unintended.
i also hate people who smell because they don't clean themselves, and use excuses for that
I also hate people who make other people live in a situation where they can't take care of themselves and then try to dominate places they seek refuge because our fucking system sucks.

I also hate that there is more food than people can eat and restaurants closing when there are hungry people.

i also despise that we have more vacant houses in this country than we have family units.
some are just rotting away from neglect.

and i most especially hate people who get off on watching whole landscapes decay.

there is tons of work for the proper people
some of it is hard
some of it is tedious
its these kind of tasks that are necessary
the right spirit and the RIGHT COMPENSATION and the work gets done.. hopefully.

starting out with placing everyone in means to eat and sleep and clean themselves seems the most important.

everything else is icing on the cake, because by and large many people get sick of doing the same exact things, and people hate staring at the wall.

the problem is, there are alot of people who are, due to extreme damages from our modified culture, extremely abnormal, sadistic and untrustworthy around... anyone.

so with more time on their hands, they get bored and turn destructive and antisocial and breed people to be worse.

years I've been preaching this.
same people fly past in man places.
here and there some new fool marches in, eyes sparkling with malevolence, only to get caught in the same eternal loop and be absorbed into it.
i haven't seen one such as myself that I know of, that showed up with every intention of changing their life, becoming friendly with people, finding the things they enjoyed, and improving themselves intellectually, emotionally and socially; searching for an environment filled with more people who would be helpful to this extent, getting a rude awakening and realizing how horrible their country was becoming.

don't know if I should be happy being alone as the only sane person. heh.

I really don't want to be. I just want us to be happy. this is deserved after so much hardship. after seeing how people in general have become.

oh we all have lusts and vices and shortcomings, but the gulf that had grown between ordinary folk and the general population is astoundingly wide.

It's a shame that people don't want to use F# but prise C# for how cool it became and continue becoming. At the same time, little do they know that many of the features were simply drawn from F#.

It's just rediculous how far this OO and C-Style syntax crap has progressed. They keep copying things from functional langugages, making the initial language to be a monstrocity like C++ is now, insted of just using languages like C#. I mean, it was right there before C#: async/task, immutablility, records, indexes, lambdas, non-null by default, who the hell knows what else.
Besides, many people (in my company at least) are just blindly overengineering with patterns and shit, where a simple function would be just enogh.

Watch some some NDC talks about F#, in particular those of Scott Wlaschin. It's just better in so many ways: less noice (I'm looking at you, brackets, commas and semicolons), the whole LOT of type inference and less duplication (just look at the C# signatures of linq methods - it's difficult to read them), immutability by default, non-nullable by default, ADTs and pattern matching, some neat features like type providers (how many times have used "paste special" or an online tool to create C# classes from a JSON/XML file, and how many times have your regenrated it because of schema changes?) and units of measure.

Of course, in some cases it's not optimal, in some cases mutable datastructures of C# are better for performance. But dude, how many performance critical systems have you wrote in C#? I mean, if it comes to performance you should use Rust or C++ or C after all.

*sighs*

Have you ever tried to get something working in node.js... and the version and uninstall and reinstall... hours and hours of dicking around with this god damn raspberry pi zero only to find that node jack shit does not support the "older" ARM 6 processor on the newest raspberry pi zero Wi-Fi units. And omg the amateurs out there with the copy-paste half-assed "help" clogging out the real info. God damn hobby ware.

background-position works relative to its actual size (as in if you scale the background up 2 times, 256px have a whole different position).

like dafuq. how am i supposed to use that with pixels as units?

All of our products have a 16x2 lcd. Every April fool's we make all of them say some offensive/funny stuff. One year I made an Arduino controller for one of the other engineers units it took him a few hours trying to figure out how I was doing it 'cause he couldn't fix it.

Completed units where the faculty chooses to specifically code in python.
Gets MIPS assembly code thrown at us for 3 weeks only.

Goes back to Python...
Next Unit jumps to Linux, spends 8 weeks on Linux, gives all the students a 10 page assignment in Javacc worth 20% , linked to a 46 page doc they must read and learn on their own...

:D

This one is funny for me because my current team lead and I have a really comical dynamic regarding reviews.

I can't say I've ever really had a bad experience but I brought up one stand up about how he had rejected my PR and that he was probably just going to reject the next one. So now it's this joke if I get a PR through in one review (which is usually).

One time he spiked a ping pong ball towards me in a match and I replied, "Hey whoa man, this isn't a code review calm down!". 😂

C++: the Static Initialisation Order Fiasco. If you have two static instances in separate translation units, there is no way to guarantee their initialisation order, you're at the mercy of the compiler/linker. If one of the instance constructors depends on the other already being initialised, you have a 50% random chance of your program blowing up. The same ordering problem applies to global destruction at program termination time.

Trying to sell my team on switching to a new technology.

Told my boss I'd bust ass to get a feature similar demo ready in 2 months by myself, on my own time, because I fucking HATE the current stack we're battling against every fucking day.

There goes my life for 2 months. Fuck.

So I am looking at top on our embedded system. I notice the memory amounts are in KiB. Then I thought to myself: "We are not far from this being in MiB units."

I am excited for Terahertz optical cpus and Petabyte storage drives.

Watched UFO 2018.
Movie mostly about guy trying to solve math problem but nice.
Learned about fine-structure constant and that all base SI units were redefined in 2019 lol.

I don’t remember anyone mentioned that scientists changed all of standardized measurements.

Overall nice movie if you like those about solving imaginary problem without special effects etc...

Looks like nobody cares how much kilogram weights.

imagine the guys in the datacenter are switching out power distribution units - and suddenly your productive database cluster reboots :)

I work for a media company with different business units such as radio, print, newspaper etc and radio is the largest (most money) of them all. The online unit (dev & social media) was relatively small until recently. So IT and budget is mostly focussed on radio.

Last budget meeting we asked to upgrade our internet and hardware (we have shitty laptops and very shitty screens). CTO of the group says to me: "I don't really belive in the internet because I don't really understand it so I can't see why you need these upgrades...nobody else complains about these issues."

Me internally: "how the fuck did you become CTO....??"
Me to him: nobody complains because they are sales consultants who reads emails and make phone calls all day...
CTO: I'll look into it but i'm not really convinced...

How do you win this fight???

My sense of confidence goes up when I have to explain CSS cascading and absolute vs relative units to back end devs, and their brains explode a little

My uni doesn't seem to offer any front end units, is that something I should be concerned about or should I be able to pick it up in my own time?

Having such bad ADD that I have 20 different projects going in 20 different stacks / languages.

It's cool to have breadth but now I really need depth. But what do I choose?

Ah fuckit I'll just go try out this other shiny new thing.

I really need help. We are doing some interface files, something like C header files and configurations.

Management is aware of the "unittesting" buzz words and expects me to write unit tests on "header" and configuration files....

I tried to explain that there are no units to be tested, asked which units should be tested but in the end....

What does it actually mean to test definitions of structures, classes and methods?!

I work at a corporation with dozens of different products and different legal units and teams working with different products. As many of the products are business acquisitions and not internally developed, they've retained whatever (cloud) architecture they had to begin with... some hosted on AWS, others on Azure and yet others on GCP.... Yet the core products are all on the same provider's platform, so all the documentation for some unexplainable reason assumes every other product is on that platform, too, and does not take into account interprovider communication problems, so integration becomes a major pain in the arse when the product you're working on (like mine) is not hosted on that one cloud provider's platform... Whole week I've felt like banging my head repeatedly to the wall.

Has anyone had good results with cheap portable air conditioning units that cost less than a hundred bucks USD?

I dont get why companies shy away from proper source managment and devops it just sounds like managmentheaven:
Your developers would write down every single thing they did in nice and easily quantifiable units of work, with then they did it exactly to the minute, and with CI/CD patches could be released directly after being tested. And tests mean the devs even safe some QA time.

Three days out from a field trial, I receive a bug report and change request. A month ago I was told that testing had been completed and the feature set signed off.

Not only have all our manufacturers received their hardware images, not only have they fulfilled our orders but all units have been delivered to our customers!!

After pointing all of this out I hear that wonderful phrase all Devs know and love, "well how hard can it be?"

"Well how hard can it be to flash all of the hardware?"

That has been delivered to all of our customers?

In every state?

All over the whole country?

Just No!

My homies really out here giving me three units to test spread out across two + four thirds of a file and expect me not to raise an eyebrow.

No, that is not three + one third. That would imply that the thirds all belong to one unit, or one file for that matter.

How someone can think that the best idea to store a vector of physical values, knowing perfectly in which unit measure it needs to be provided for the back end to work, is to couple a vector of strings with the units, is beyond me.

2 weeks+ ago I made a PR into our codebase containing sample refactor that streamlined a significant portion of code. Also, I did refactor only on two handler packages (for MVC folks, that's Controller) as proof of concept, to figure out how convinient / logical the part would be for everyone.

We have rule of 2 approvals for merge (for 5 team members)

While writing refactor, it obviously blown up a lot of unit tests, but still coverage was fairly poor (that stuff was rushed, there was back than no time for unit tests). After my refactor I spent couple of days writing tests that hit fairly sweet (comparatively) coverage. (I managed to bump coverage from low 20s to high 80s, and have less code for tests)

I got first approve pretty much immidietely, other team member was on vacations, and 2 of them forgot.

We generally try to close PRs fairly quickly (usually same day kind of deal), but that one was just.. hanging in there. So I pinged everyone to re-check it to greenlight it but of course, loo and behold, merge conflicts arised. I ended up fixing actual logic (just some method signatures changed, not a big deal) and ran the units.

So, one of that handlers got quite a few of edits, and guess who is pretty much rewriting unit tests for second time now...

Dude, sometimes I question why tf I even bother with these tests... Feels like sabotaging my productivity, especially with bullshit like that

I open Photoshop, I open an image, I start editing colors. I think to myself "I need to change units to pixels instead of inches". I open the "Preferences - Units" menu. I approach the mouse and click on the selection box for units.... My screens go crazy suddenly and I get a BSOD...
The computer reboots, refuses to repair, complains it can't write on the disk. I launch UBCD, start TestDisk, it tells me my MFT and the mirror MFT are both completely messed up and the partition contents as well... Wow wow... What the...?!
Complete reinstall.
Thank you Intel GFX system driver.

Is there a book I gotta read to understand the freetype documentation? What the hell! I've gone through the documentation and there are like 6 different units being used here. I understand that text rendering is one of the more difficult problems in CS, but there's gotta be an easier way to learn this stuff.

Forced to write UT on excel shiit for confirming test cases are covering units properly, but the reviewer even don't want to read test code!! it makes incredibly unmaintainable documents

need units to test new release built, says they'll be ready by Thursday afternoon. it's Friday they'll be ready Monday. yeah cause it's not like we have a deadline or anything.