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Hey everyone,
Merry Christmas to everyone who celebrates, happy holidays to everyone, and happy almost-new-year!
We had a bit of a slow year in terms of devRant updates, but we gained some momentum towards the end of the year and we're looking forward to carrying it into 2020. Recently, we launched what I think are our coolest new avatar items yet (https://devrant.com/rants/2322869/...) and behind the scenes we got our iOS/Android apps on the latest version of the frameworks we use, which will help us continue to improve stability. Still, we definitely would have liked to do more, but we're optimistic the coming year will bring great things for devRant.
One thing we are very proud of is this year we had our best year ever in terms of platform stability and uptime. Despite the platform growing and our userbase growing, we had almost no complete app downtime even though our infrastructure is minimal. A large part of this is thanks to devRant++ supporters, who allow us to maintain a small but effective tier of infrastructure and redundancy.
In the coming year, we're going to launch one of our most ambitious initiatives yet, and we're also going to continue to improve the devRant experience itself. We want to try to gather more user feedback, so we'll be working on a way to do that too. Stay tuned, more on this stuff coming soon.
As always, thank you everyone, and thanks for your amazing contributions to the devRant community! And thank you to our awesome devRant++ supporters for continuing to be the main drivers to keeping devRant up and running.
Looking forward to 2020,
- David and Tim
28 -
https://git.kernel.org/…/ke…/... sure some of you are working on the patches already, if you are then lets connect cause, I am an ardent researcher for the same as of now.
So here it goes:
As soon as kernel page table isolation(KPTI) bug will be out of embargo, Whatsapp and FB will be flooded with over-night kernel "shikhuritee" experts who will share shitty advices non-stop.
1. The bug under embargo is a side channel attack, which exploits the fact that Intel chips come with speculative execution without proper isolation between user pages and kernel pages. Therefore, with careful scheduling and timing attack will reveal some information from kernel pages, while the code is running in user mode.
In easy terms, if you have a VPS, another person with VPS on same physical server may read memory being used by your VPS, which will result in unwanted data leakage. To make the matter worse, a malicious JS from innocent looking webpage might be (might be, because JS does not provide language constructs for such fine grained control; atleast none that I know as of now) able to read kernel pages, and pawn you real hard, real bad.
2. The bug comes from too much reliance on Tomasulo's algorithm for out-of-order instruction scheduling. It is not yet clear whether the bug can be fixed with a microcode update (and if not, Intel has to fix this in silicon itself). As far as I can dig, there is nothing that hints that this bug is fixable in microcode, which makes the matter much worse. Also according to my understanding a microcode update will be too trivial to fix this kind of a hardware bug.
3. A software-only remedy is possible, and that is being implemented by all major OSs (including our lovely Linux) in kernel space. The patch forces Translation Lookaside Buffer to flush if a context switch happens during a syscall (this is what I understand as of now). The benchmarks are suggesting that slowdown will be somewhere between 5%(best case)-30%(worst case).
4. Regarding point 3, syscalls don't matter much. Only thing that matters is how many times syscalls are called. For example, if you are using read() or write() on 8MB buffers, you won't have too much slowdown; but if you are calling same syscalls once per byte, a heavy performance penalty is guaranteed. All processes are which are I/O heavy are going to suffer (hostings and databases are two common examples).
5. The patch can be disabled in Linux by passing argument to kernel during boot; however it is not advised for pretty much obvious reasons.
6. For gamers: this is not going to affect games (because those are not I/O heavy)
Meltdown: "Meltdown" targeted on desktop chips can read kernel memory from L1D cache, Intel is only affected with this variant. Works on only Intel.
Spectre: Spectre is a hardware vulnerability with implementations of branch prediction that affects modern microprocessors with speculative execution, by allowing malicious processes access to the contents of other programs mapped memory. Works on all chips including Intel/ARM/AMD.
For updates refer the kernel tree: https://git.kernel.org/…/ke…/...
For further details and more chit-chats refer: https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/...
~Cheers~
(Originally written by Adhokshaj Mishra, edited by me. )
23 -
And here comes the last part of my story so far.
After deploying the domain, configuring PCs, configuring the server, configuring the switch, installing software, checking that the correct settings have been applied, configuring MS Outlook (don't ask) and giving each and every user a d e t a i l e d tutorial on using the PC like a modern human and not as a Homo Erectus, I had to lock my door, put down my phone and disconnect the ship's announcement system's speaker in my room. The reasons?
- No one could use USB storage media, or any storage media. As per security policy I emailed and told them about.
- No one could use the ship's computers to connect to the internet. Again, as per policy.
- No one had any games on their Windows 10 Pro machines. As per policy.
- Everyone had to use a 10-character password, valid for 3 months, with certain restrictions. As per policy.
For reasons mentioned above, I had to (almost) blackmail the CO to draft an order enforcing those policies in writing (I know it's standard procedure for you, but for the military where I am it was a truly alien experience). Also, because I never trusted the users to actually backup their data locally, I had UrBackup clone their entire home folder, and a scheduled task execute a script storing them to the old online drive. Soon it became apparent why: (for every sysadmin this is routine, but this was my first experience)
- People kept deleting their files, whining to me to restore them
- People kept getting locked out because they kept entering their password WRONG for FIVE times IN a ROW because THEY had FORGOTTEN the CAPS lock KEY on. Had to enter three or four times during weekend for that.
- People kept whining about the no-USB policy, despite offering e-mail and shared folders.
The final straw was the updates. The CO insisted that I set the updates to manual because some PCs must not restart on their own. The problem is, some users barely ever checked. One particular user, when I asked him to check and do the updates, claimed he did that yesterday. Meanwhile, on the WSUS console: PC inactive for over 90 days.
I blocked the ship's phone when I got reassigned.
Phiew, finally I got all those off my chest! Thanks, guys. All of the rants so far remind me of one quote from Dave Barry:
7 -
A quite severe vulnerability was found in Skype (at least for windows, not sure about other systems) allowing anyone with system access (remote or local) to replace the update files skype downloads before updating itself with malicious versions because skype doesn't check the integrity of local files. This could allow an attacker to, once gaining access to the system, 'inject' any malicious DLL into skype by placing it in the right directory with the right file name and waiting for the user to update (except with auto updates of course).
From a company like Microsoft, taking in mind that skype has hundreds of millions of users worldwide, I'd expect them to take a very serious stance on this and work on a patch as soon as possible.
What they said about this: they won't be fixing it anytime soon as it would require a quite big rewrite of skype.
This kinda shit makes me so fucking angry, especially when it comes from big ass companies 😡. Take your fucking responsibility, Microsoft.20 -
--- New API allows developers to update Android Apps while using them ---
Today, at the Android Dev Summit, Google announced a new API which allows developers to update an app while using it.
Until now, you were forced to close the app and were locked out of it until the update has finished.
This new API adds two different options:
1.) A Full-Screen experience which locks the user out of the app which should be used for critical updates when you expect the user to wait for the update to be applied immediately. This option is very similar to how the update flow worked until now.
2.) A flexible update so users can keep using the app while it's updating. Google also said that you can completely customize the update flow so it feels like part of your app!
For now, the API is only available for early-access partners, but it will be released for everyone soon!
Source:
https://android-developers.googleblog.com/...
19 -
The last year my school installed MagicBoards (whiteboard with beamer that responses to touch) in every class room and called itself "ready for the future of media". What they also got is A FUCKING LOW SPEC SERVER RUNNING DEBIAN 6 W/O ANY UPDATES SINCE 2010 WHICH IS DYING CONSTANTLY.
As I'm a nice person I asked the 65 y/o technician (who is also my physics teacher) whether I could help updating this piece of shit.
Teacher: "Naahh, we don't have root access to the server and also we'll get a new company maintaining our servers in two years. And even if we would have the root access, we can't give that to a student."
My head: "Two. Years. TWO YEARS?! ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME YOU RETARDED PIECE OF SHIT?! YOU'RE TELLING ME YOU DON'T HAVE TO INSTALL UPDATES EVEN THOUGH YOU CREATE AN SSH USER FOR EVERY FUCKING STUDENT SO THEY CAN LOGIN USING THEIR BIRTH DATE?! DID YOU EVER HEAR ABOUT SECURITY VULNERABILITIES IN YOUR LITTLE MISERABLE LIFE OR SOUNDS 'CVE-2016-5195' LIKE RANDOM LETTERS AND NUMBERS TO YOU?! BECAUSE - FUNFACT - THERE ARE TEN STUDENTS WHO ARE IN THE SUDO GROUP IF YOU EVEN KNOW WHAT THAT IS!"
Me (because I want to keep my good grades): "Yes, that sounds alright."13 -
I extracted a tangled action to its own api, and wrote a test for it.
The test failed.
I added debugging, more debugging, all the debugging. It still fails. But I can at least see why it fails!
It turns out the api finds and updates the wrong user. It finds and updates the wrong user EVEN WHEN THERE ARE NO OTHER USERS.
WHAT THE SALAMI.
Also, the user lookup it uses is extremely roundabout and takes several seconds with ~2 million users. Normally I'd fix the lookup, but it has been in production for several years, and I'm terrified it will break something if I fix it.
Blargherhagrid.7 -
So yesterday our team got a new toy. A big ass 4k screen to display some graphs on. Took a while to assemble the stand, hang the TV on that stand, but we got there.
So our site admin gets us a new HDMI cable. Coleague told us his lappy supports huge screens as he used to plug his home TV in his work lappy while WFHing. He grabs that HDMI, plugs one end into the screen, another - into his lappy and
.. nothing...
Windows does not recognize any new devices connected. The screen does not show any signs of any changes. Oh well..
Site IT admin installs all the updates, all the new drivers, upgrades BIOS and gives another try.
Nothing.
So naturally the cable is to blame. The port is working for him at home, so it's sure not port's fault. Also he uses his 2-monitor setup at work, so the port is 100% working!
I'm curious. What if..... While they are busy looking for another cable, I take that first one, plug it into my Linux (pretty much stock LinuxMint installation w/ X) lappy,
3.. 2.. 1..
and my desktop is now on the big ass 4k fat screen.
Folks. Enough bitching about Linux being picky about the hardware and Windows being more user friendly, having PnP and so. I'm not talking about esoteric devices. I'm talking about BAU devices that most of home users are using. A monitor, a printer, a TV screen, a scanner, wireless/usb speaker/mouse/keyboard/etc...
Linux just works. Face it
P.S. today they are still trying to make his lappy work with that TV screen. No luck yet.
17 -
tl;dr @Root refactors some spaghetti.
I'm refactoring an api that creates a support message. It's a post route.
When seeing a magic hardcoded message string, this route instead updates the user object, and does not create a support message.
It also returns different results if the user is muted (fine) or if saving the message succeeds or fails (fine).
But if the user is creating a duplicate message, it doesn't save the message (fine) and... redirects to listing their messages instead? Wat?
Also, when refactoring this (migrating to a new message backend), I discovered that not all routes return a response. If the message is a non-duplicate, from a non-muted player, from a non-redacted client, the route doesn't respond at all!
So, I'm having fun cleaning this up. I actually am. Except I'll need to support all of the legacy clients for the next lifetime or two. I mean, really. There are still people with Android v2 devices who are using this thing. not even kidding.9 -
! a Rant
Dear fellow devRanters!
I have an announcement to make. After we shared Programmer’s Music (www.programmersmusic.com) on devRant, we had so many awesome user started using our service and they still do. We love you all for that and thank you for you continuous support and use.
Now that our team has become more focused and productive, we took upon a new problem to tackle a few months back. The problem we chose is about increasing email productivity and ability to comprehend knowledge hidden in emails in a more effective way. We are excited to introduce ‘Altmail’! (https://www.altmail.in)
We believe that there’s a hidden treasure in your inbox waiting to be explored. All those newsletters and blog updates, all those deals, all those Medium digests and LinkedIn alerts, contain keys to becoming a better version of yourself. So we have made it Altmail’s mission to help you spend less time organising and more time acquiring knowledge. Altmail transforms your cluttered inbox into the source of knowledge, automagically.
We are currently in private beta and have limited invites left, to be specific 33 out of 100. Please check it out here - http://at.altmail.in/devRant!
We are looking forward to your honest feedback! :)
Thanks a ton!
Cheers!
21 -
I've got a confession to make.
A while ago I refurbished this old laptop for someone, and ended up installing Bodhi on it. While I was installing it however, I did have some wicked thoughts..
What if I could ensure that the system remains up-to-date by running an updater script in a daily cron job? That may cause the system to go unstable, but at least it'd be up-to-date. Windows Update for Linux.
What if I could ensure that the system remains protected from malware by periodically logging into it and checking up, and siphoning out potential malware code? The network proximity that's required for direct communication could be achieved by offering them free access to one of my VPN servers, in the name of security or something like that. Permanent remote access, in the name of security. I'm not sure if Windows has this.
What if I could ensure that the system remains in good integrity by disabling the user from accessing root privileges, and having them ask me when they want to install a piece of software? That'd make the system quite secure, with the only penetration surface now being kernel exploits. But it'd significantly limit what my target user could do with their own machine.
At the end I ended up discarding all of these thoughts, because it'd be too much work to implement and maintain, and it'd be really non-ethical. I felt filthy from even thinking about these things. But the advantages of something like this - especially automated updates, which are a real issue on my servers where I tend to forget to apply them within a couple of weeks - can't just be disregarded. Perhaps Microsoft is on to something?11 -
I did it: I built up another PC identical to my machine (https://devrant.com/rants/2923002/...) for my SO and installed Linux Mint for her, too. That had been my primary motive for an easy and stable distro in the first place.
Now that didn't come out of the blue. We were discussing the end of Win 7 already two years ago where I brought up my concerns with Win 10 - mainly the forced, lousy updates and the integrated spyware, and that I was considering Linux as way out.
I had expected quite some pushback because she had been exclusively on Windows since the 90s. However, I didn't sell Linux as upgrade. It's just that Win 7 is over, progress under Windows as well, and we're in damage control mode. Went down pretty well.
Fast forward three weeks - remember, first time Linux user and no IT-geek:
- it just works, including web, videos, and music.
- she likes Cinnamon.
- nice desktop themes.
- Redshift is as good as f.lux.
- software installation is just like an app store.
- updates work via an easy tray icon.
- quote: "Linux is great!"
- given this alternative, she doesn't understand why people willingly put up with Win 10.
- no drive letters: already forgotten.
- popcorn for upcoming Win 10 disaster stories.
- why do Windows updates take that long?
- why does Windows need to reboot for every update?
- why does Windows hang in that update boot screen for so long?
I'm impressed that Linux has come so far that it's suitable for end users. Next in line is her father who wants to try Linux, but that will be a story for tomorrow.22 -
I am so fucking sick of getting asked to implement special cases / features for 1 fucking customer just because the customer wants to do something differently (read fucking stupidly).
This piece of shit codebase already has easy on 500 special cases that were put in place to please some asshole who does'nt even use the feature he demanded once he realised what a wanker he was being.
Now I have to put in yet another bunch of conditional statements all over the place to pad another fucking douche bags ego.
For fuck sake can they not just use the software as it is. If some dick really wants shit his special glorious way can we not just fork the codebase give him his shit and he can stay on the same special fucking version forever without future updates because the other 99% of user aren't retarded.11 -
Not just another Windows rant:
*Disclaimer* : I'm a full time Linux user for dev work having switched from Windows a couple of years ago. Only open Windows for Photoshop (or games) or when I fuck up my Linux install (Arch user) because I get too adventurous (don't we all)
I have hated Windows 10 from day 1 for being a rebel. Automatic updates and generally so many bugs (specially the 100% disk usage on boot for idk how long) really sucked.
It's got ads now and it's generally much slower than probably a Windows 8 install..
The pathetic memory management and the overall slower interface really ticks me off. I'm trying to work and get access to web services and all I get is hangups.
Chrome is my go-to browser for everything and the experience is sub par. We all know it gobbles up RAM but even more on Windows.
My Linux install on the same computer flies with a heavy project open in Android Studio, 25+ tabs in Chrome and a 1080p video playing in the background.
Up until the creators update, UI bugs were a common sight. Things would just stop working if you clicked them multiple times.
But you know what I'm tired of more?
The ignorant pricks who bash it for being Windows. This OS isn't bad. Sure it's not Linux or MacOS but it stands strong.
You are just bashing it because it's not developer friendly and it's not. It never advertises itself like that.
It's a full fledged OS for everyone. It's not dev friendly but you can make it as much as possible but you're lazy.
People do use Windows to code. If you don't know that, you're ignorant. They also make a living by using Windows all day. How bout tha?
But it tries to make you feel comfortable with the recent bash integration and the plethora of tools that Microsoft builds.
IIS may not be Apache or Nginx but it gets the job done.
Azure uses Windows and it's one of best web services out there. It's freaking amazing with dead simple docs to get up and running with a web app in 10 minutes.
I saw many rants against VS but you know it's one of the best IDEs out there and it runs the best on Windows (for me, at least).
I'm pissed at you - you blind hater you.
Research and appreciate the things good qualities in something instead of trying to be the cool but ignorant dev who codes with Linux/Mac but doesn't know shit about the advantages they offer.22 -
So I looked at our dashboard and noticed a banner mentioning scheduled maintenance set for 7:00 AM. And I thought to myself, "I never released an update, and even if I had, the maintenance would be performed 15 minutes after the build finished, not at 7:00 AM." So I emailed my coworkers, asking if they had put up the banner, no, no. I started pulling my hair out trying to figure out what caused this banner to be created. Was there some old job that was just now running? I combed through the server logs, thousands of entries later, and I found the banner was installed by some user with the IP 172.18.0.1...which was the local machine. I went through all the users on the system, running atq to see if anyone had jobs scheduled. And there was one job scheduled, under the root user. At that moment, I legit thought to myself, "have we been hacked? How is that possible?" It's wasn't! Then I looked under /var/spool/atjobs to see what the job actually was. And then I saw it. My weekly updater cron job had installed updates and had scheduled a maintenance window to reboot the system. And I smiled, realizing that my code was now sentient.
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!rant
Linux vs Microsoft
Well, this war is certainly one of the oldest. IMO,
Linux - great for automating stuff, free, and customisable.
Windows - user friendly, softwares much more easily available, much easier to use.
Frankly, I have tried using Linux a lot of times, but never liked it one bit. I am a GUI fan and hate to type commands for every little thing. Plus installing Ubuntu wiped out my disk once and I lost all my school memories ( this was in 2008, I didn't know much about backups, was quite young) ,so I am quite vary of it. I just don't feel it to be intuitive. Just to do a simple task, I loathe to learn difficult commands, and just read the syntax.
However, I have no bias against people who use Linux.
It is like religion, live and let live, follow whatever suits you.
On devrant, why's there so much hate for Windows? Because it is paid? Because it has updates? So what!
I never had a problem with it, I update once a month, takes 10 mins. If you set up your active hours correctly, it works great, you can disable updates also. Windows 10 is highly stable. It is paid, but in my country almost all laptops come with windows preinstalled. The OS-less laptops are about $10 cheaper, which is not that much to freak about.
Would love to hear your views and logical arguments.
Please be polite.36 -
God damn fucking Windows bullshit.
Why is the fuck does Microsoft HATE its users?
Latest updates, and no fuck Windows 11, completely BREAKS all of my WSL environments.
Home directories are gone, or the environments are corrupt and won't even run.
99% of the issues these dense shit-fucks cause are because they RaNdOmLy reboot for their dumbass updates instead of scheduling them with the end user. During these rebots, do you thing they wait for everything to shut down?
HELL NO!
They just shut that shit down like they fucking own it. Editors? Gone. Browsers? Gone. WSL Consoles? Gone. Docker containers? Gone. IEdge? Hey, we have great news, we made IE your default browser again! BTW, your upgrade to Windows 11 is free until we force you to upgrade!
I'm so fed up with it.....so fucking tired of it...
The only reason why I even use WSL these days is to ssh into my Linux devices or run some quick dev tests in containers. Why not use PuTTY for SSH? Because it fucking SUCKS that's why.
I'm feeling so many emotions right now over bullshit that shouldn't even be happening. I'm literally at the point that I'm just going to install Linux on this device and just create a Windows VM on one of my hosts so I can still do "work" things that involve leadership.19 -
This one's for all the SysAdmins out there.
About 4 years ago I was asked to take over a dental offices systems administration (~20 machines) after their previous guy had allowed their servers RAID 1 to fail and hadn't done any updates or general maintenance. (please take note this office is my parents dental office).
I since have been recovering from his poor configuration and setup by instating an active directory environment and installing up to date software as well as updating machines on the domain to Windows 10 since windows 7 is no longer supported. I have also been properly licensing everything.
My bosses (my parents) are annoyed with this because "it's more expensive" and "it's too complicated we don't know how to manage it" and I don't know how to explain to them that they aren't fucking systems admins. They asked why they could do it before and I tried to explain that now it's secure and things need to be rolled out on the network level. They had every user running full local admin on every workstation plus the server.
Some people don't fucking understand that just because it's simple doesn't make it a good fucking idea. And because it's cheap doesn't mean it will always be (just wait till Microsoft audits you).
Oh and they also don't understand fucking CAL licensing and refuse to pay for gsuite for all their staff who use it. Instead they just have two gsuite accounts and give everyone the fucking password.
I'm going to have an aneurysm6 -
User: "I emailed my spreadsheet to a colleague. Why can't I see their updates in mine?"
Please just kill me now.16 -
Why is it that pretty much zero package & framework maintainers understand semantic versioning?
1. If you do a complete rewrite of your package, but the resulting API is identical, you don't need to bump to the next major version. As a user, I'm thankful for your increased performance or cleaner internal code, but it doesn't really affect my update process.
2. If your package required some-framework 6.0.0, and now ALSO supports some-framework 7.0.0 but is still compatible with 6.0.0, you don't need to bump to the next major version. As a user, I can now upgrade the framework, and know that the package will keep working, but otherwise it doesn't really affect me.
3. Following your versioning along with the framework/language version is super annoying, especially if your library really doesn't need to differentiate between framework versions because it's not actually utilizing new framework functionality.
4. On the other hand, if you stop supporting a certain language, framework or shared library version, or change the public methods, exceptions, fields, etc, you MUST bump to a new major version.
Yet everyone gets this wrong.
For example, many of Laravel's underlying subpackages (for collections, filesystem, database, config, http, mail, etc) do not change their code in a breaking way, or do not even change at all between major framework versions.
Yet they follow along with the major framework version.
Now if someone makes a library "laravel-elasticsearch" which uses the support libraries and collections from laravel, they need to update their package to move along with the versions as well, and often they choose to number their library along with the framework in turn.
This means that to update the framework, you also need to update over 9000 dependencies.
FOR NO FUCKING REASON. THE ONLY CHANGE IN THOSE FUCKING DEPENDENCIES IS TO UPDATE COMPOSER.JSON TO BE COMPATIBLE WITH THE FUCKING FRAMEWORK.
Meanwhile, Laravel itself breaks repeatedly on minor/patch version updates, because breaking changes slip through their review process.
Ugh.3 -
! exactly dev
I'd ditched Windows and spent a while exploring the Linux ecosystem for content creation. And I have to say, it was not a nice experience.
As much as I respect the Linux mantra of "free as in freedom" and "you need to roll up your sleeves and figure out stuff on your own", it just isn't good enough for non-dev work. Sorry guys, but I need software that gets out of my way and at least does what it's supposed to do. I can't stand a horrible UI or delays and random crashes, which is exactly what happens with most things under Linux.
To replace my Windows workflow I used the following:
1. Windows -> elementaryOS (because Debian/Ubuntu repositories seem to have the best software support, and elementaryOS is the least horrible looking thing that supports that) and then Arch, because, well, Arch.
2. Blender + Maya -> Blender + Maya on Linux.
3. Reaper + FL Studio -> Ardour + LMMS.
4. Photoshop -> GIMP + Krita + Inkscape.
5. ZBrush -> nothing :(
As you can see, my use cases are pretty much all over the spectrum.
Firstly, installing and configuring stuff. A pleasure on Windows, an absolute pain on Linux. Everything just worked on Windows, I had to wrestle with library versions and patches and unstable audio layers (Linux audio just sucks, except for JACK) on Linux.
Out of these, Blender and Maya were the best experience. But even then, both would suffer from random crashes that just didn't happen on Windows.
Ardour is actually really nice when it works. Its use of JACK for routing makes it really really flexible, but it just isn't stable enough to depend on. LMMS is utter crap. I'm sorry, but I just hate the UI. Can't stand it.
GIMP, Krita, and Inkscape can't beat Photoshop, even when you consider them together. Adobe software workflow is just so much better and more intuitive.
Blender 3D sculpting is not bad, but it's nowhere as good as ZBrush.
Also, if you're a C++ dev like me, nothing beats Visual Studio 2017. Nothing. That IDE just blows everything else out of the water. Even VSCode. And it's not slow at all, it handled a fairly large project (PBRTv3) just fine on my Windows development VM. Yes, a VM.
So...I ditched Linux and went back to Windows, but I keep Linux as a VM for when I actually want to mess with Blender or Ardour. Or some dev stuff which Windows sucks at (which is becoming less frequent because of WSL).
Out of all the above, the only one I'd consider ready for production use would be Blender. Developers of open source software, please learn from Blender. Kickass UI and user friendly operation is extremely important, you can't make a random window with GTK buttons and text boxes and arcane config files and expect people to use it for serious work.
Also, Windows beats Linux hands down as an everyday OS. It's always been rock solid, if you take care of it properly (and that goes for any OS). Updates hardly take any time because I run it on a SSD. As for all the advertising and marketing bullshit, you can block a large amount of stuff. And for what can't be blocked, well, I just have to live with it, because the alternative is compromising on my creative output, which is too much for me.
I still run Linux on my server, though. And on my embedded devices (Pi, BeagleBone, etc.). It absolutely rocks there.
I realize that Linux software is not going to improve unless we do something about it, so I'll be contributing fixes and code (the joys of being a C++ dev, yay). Still, I feel that the platform and software as a whole is just not mature enough.18 -
Got pulled out of bed at 6 am again this morning, our VMs were acting up again. Not booting, running extremely slow, high disk usage, etc.
This was the 6 time in as many weeks this happened. And always the marching orders were the same. Find the bug, smash the bug, get it working with the least effort. I've dumped hundreds of hours maintaining this broken shitheap of a system, putting off other duties to keep mission critical stations running.
The culprits? Scummy consultants, Windows 10 1709, and Citrix Studio.
Xen Server performed well enough, likely due to its open source origins and Centos architecture.
Whelp. DasSeahawks was good and pissed. Nothing like getting rousted out of bed after a few scant hours rest for patching the same broken system.
DasSeahawks lost his temper. Things went flying. Exorcists were dispatched and promptly eaten.
Enough. No consultants, no analysts, and no experts touched it. No phone calls, no manuals, not even a google search. Just a very pissed admin and his minion declaring blitzkrieg.
We made our game plan, moved the users out, smoked our cigs, chugged monster, and queued a gnu-metal playlist on spotify.
Then we took a wrecking ball to the whole setup. User docs were saved, all else was rm -r * && shred && summon -u Poseidon -beast Land_Cracken.
Started at 3pm and finished just after midnight. Rebuilt all the vms with RDP, murdered citrix studio (and their bullshit licenses), completely blocked Windows 10 updates after 1607, and load balanced the network.
So what do we get when all the experts are fired? Stabbed lightning. VMs boot in less than 10 seconds, apps open instantly, and server resources are half their previous usage state. My VMs are now the fastest stations in our complex, as they should be.
Next to do: install our mxgpu, script up snapshots and heartbeat, destroy Windows ads/telemetry, and setup PDQ. damn its good to be good!
What i learned --> never allow testing to go to production, consultants will fuck up your shit for a buck, and vendors are half as reliable over consultants. Windows works great without Microsoft, thin clients are overpriced, and getting pissed gets things done.
This my friends, is why admins are assholes.4 -
What a new years start..
"Kernel memory leaking Intel processor design flaw forces Linux, Windows redesign"
"Crucially, these updates to both Linux and Windows will incur a performance hit on Intel products. The effects are still being benchmarked, however we're looking at a ballpark figure of five to 30 per cent slow down"
"It is understood the bug is present in modern Intel processors produced in the past decade. It allows normal user programs – from database applications to JavaScript in web browsers – to discern to some extent the layout or contents of protected kernel memory areas."
"The fix is to separate the kernel's memory completely from user processes using what's called Kernel Page Table Isolation, or KPTI. At one point, Forcefully Unmap Complete Kernel With Interrupt Trampolines, aka FUCKWIT, was mulled by the Linux kernel team, giving you an idea of how annoying this has been for the developers."
>How can this security hole be abused?
"At worst, the hole could be abused by programs and logged-in users to read the contents of the kernel's memory."
https://theregister.co.uk/2018/01/...
22 -
You stupid lousy price of potato shit windows, yes that’s right - this pissed of windows user is pissed the fuck right off.
Here I am letting you sit there idling along and then I press the start button, you know that fucking button I press regularly for fucking years, only for you to go “fuck you, I’m going to blue screen instead” like what the flying fuck? There hasn’t been any updates in a while that I’ve noticed but this shit is just a shit.
So what ever, let’s reboot this mother fucker, oh wait now you can’t fucking boot, I can hear the hdd spinning a million miles an hour (coz non ssd) but noooo your just going to sit there like a dumb ass prick who doesn’t know what the fuck your doing.
So fine, let’s pull out that old USB with w10 on it and do a MBR repair... (coz nothing else will fucking work in your shit list of options) ok so apparently an MBR repair gets you booting.. but wait there’s more, now you useless piece of shit are going to run a scan disk which has sat at 0% for the past 20 minutes and I don’t think I’m ever going to see that fucker move, I get it you want to do something useful, but Fucking Do it already!
Like wtf, how does a stable system just decide to shit itself.
Oh and before you say it.. no I can’t install Linux on this piece of shit, see my previous rants for that problem.6 -
Fuck android studio updates, fuck OpenGL libraries, fuck nvidia graphics on Linux, fuck it all to hell.
These bullshit updates keep breaking stuff in apps, and then the emulator itself gets broken somehow, then I need to run a bullshit shell script I found on some esoteric Arch Linux forum to symlink OpenGL .so libraries on my Linux machine every time I update because fucking OpenGL and nvidia crappy drivers on Linux, which also broke my xrandr configs and segfaulted the xfce4-display app.
Seriously that's horseshit. Linux will never ever ever break through the glass ceiling and become idiot-proof non-tech user friendly like the botnets Winblows and macPrison.7 -
Why does MS need to be such a scumbag with Windows updates?
Every now and then, this unskipable blue setup screen appears and forces the user to make some decisions.
"Do you want to set Edge as the default browser?"
"Do you want a 360 subscription?"
The usual crap.
But it‘s not skippable!
You have to make a decision and the UI for "fuck off" is different for every decision.
You can‘t just press the Nope button every time.
It‘s fucking deliberate. They want you to spend time on reading their shit and force it down your throat.
And let‘s not forget about people who don‘t know computer stuff very well and are confused by this. Then call us because "the computer isn‘t working again."
And you can‘t tell them to skip this slimy rotten vomit of a marketing weasel because you need them to tell you what the options are for each fucking decision screen.
😫17 -
Been a Windows user since I was a kid in 2005. Switched to MacOS in 2018 due to the nature of my job. Today I went back to use my brother's Windows machine to play some games 😎
Damn! The recent updates made Windows look so good and snappy. The dark mode looks well and the navbar on the Windows App Store is translucent.8 -
I think that two criterias are important:
- don't block my productivity
- author should have his userbase in mind
1) Some simple anti examples:
- Windows popping up a big fat blue screen screaming for updates. Like... Go suck some donkey balls you stupid shit that's totally irritating you arsehole.
- Graphical tools having no UI concept. E.g. Adobes PDF reader - which was minimalized in it's UI and it became just unbearable pain. When the concept is to castrate the user in it's abilities and call the concept intuitive, it's not a concept it's shit. Other examples are e.g. GEdit - which was severely massacred in Gnome 3 if I remember correctly (never touched Gnome ever again. I was really put off because their concept just alienated me)
- Having an UI concept but no consistency. Eg. looking at a lot of large web apps, especially Atlassian software.
Too many times I had e.g. a simple HTML form. In menu 1 you could use enter. In menu 2 Enter does not work. in another menu Enter works, but it doesn't submit the form it instead submits the whole page... Which can end in clusterfuck.
Yaaayyyy.
- Keyboard usage not possible at all.
It becomes a sad majority.... Pressing tab, not switching between form fields. Looking for keyboard shortcuts, not finding any. Yes, it's a graphical interface. But the charm of 16 bit interfaces (YES. I'm praising DOS interfaces) was that once you memorized the necessary keyboard strokes... You were faster than lightning. Ever seen e.g. a good pharmacist, receptionist or warehouse clerk... most of the software is completely based on short keyboard strokes, eg. for a receptionist at a doctor for the ICD code / pharmaceutical search et cetera.
- don't poop rainbows. I mean it.
I love colors. When they make sense. but when I use some software, e.g. netdata, I think an epilepsy warning would be fair. Too. Many. Neon. Colors. -.-
2) It should be obvious... But it's become a burden.
E.g. when asked for a release as there were some fixes... Don't point to the install from master script. Maybe you like it rolling release style - but don't enforce it please. It's hard to use SHA256 hash as a version number and shortening the hash might be a bad idea.
Don't start experiments. If it works - don't throw everything over board without good reasons. E.g. my previous example of GEdit: Turning a valuable text editor into a minimalistic unusable piece of crap and calling it a genius idea for the sake of simplicity... Nope. You murdered a successful product.
Gnome 3 felt like a complete experiment and judging from the last years of changes in the news it was an rather unsuccessful one... As they gave up quite a few of their ideas.
When doing design stuff or other big changes make it a community event or at least put a poll up on the github page. Even If it's an small user base, listen to them instead of just randomly fucking them over.
--
One of my favorite projects is a texteditor called Kate from KDE.
It has a ton of features, could even be seen as a small IDE. The reason I love it because one of the original authors still cares for his creation and ... It never failed me. I use Kate since over 20 years now I think... Oo
Another example is the git cli. It's simple and yet powerful. git add -i is e.g. a thing I really really really love. (memorize the keyboard shortcuts and you'll chunk up large commits faster than flash.
Curl. Yes. The (http) download tool. It's author still cares. It's another tool I use since 20 years. And it has given me a deep insight of how HTTP worked, new protocols and again. It never failed me. It is such a fucking versatile thing. TLS debugging / performance measurements / what the frigging fuck is going on here. Take curl. Find it out.
My worst enemies....
Git based clients. I just hate them. Mostly because they fill the niche of explaining things (good) but completely nuke the learning of git (very bad). You can do any git action without understanding what you do and even worse... They encourage bad workflows.
I've seen great devs completely fucking up git and crying because they had really no fucking clue what git actually does. The UI lead them on the worst and darkest path imaginable. :(
Atlassian products. On the one hand... They're not total shit. But the mass of bugs and the complete lack of interest of Atlassian towards their customers and the cloud movement.... Ouch. Just ouch.
I had to deal with a lot of completely borked up instances and could trace it back to a bug tracking entry / atlassian, 2 - 3 years old with the comment: vote for this, we'll work on a Bugfix. Go fuck yourself you pisswads.
Microsoft Office / Windows. Oh boy.
I could fill entire days of monologues.
It's bad, hmkay?
XEN.
This is not bad.
This is more like kill it before it lays eggs.
The deeper I got into XEN, the more I wanted to lay in a bathtub full of acid to scrub of the feelings of shame... How could anyone call this good?!?????4 -
Aaarrrrghhhh! I am frustrated.
My manager keeps cancelling our 1:1, which I look forward to as a potential platform for
- Me to build a rapport
- Discuss key decisions
- Slowly gain her trust that I can lead the entire product
And whenever we connect once in a blue moon, she started inviting two other team members in. Who the hell does that!!!
My colleague, she is nice and hard-working. But she fucking talks a lot. A FUCKING LOT.
1:1 and such key connects are not meant for status updates and this colleagues goes into every minor detail and explains the shit for 15 minutes each. Non-stop. No one really cares or bothers for that level of statuses.
Today she spoke for 30 minutes without a breather break. Everyone went numb.
But whatever, fuck it. I am getting things done by her so let her talk. I'll get my way through manager and skip level guy.
On the other side, they recruited a half witted potato for training. That was completely unnecessary. I am not putting in my time and efforts on someone who isn't willing to learn and contribute.
I spent more than a week explaining her basics of how to write a god damn user story and detailed functional requirements.
And even after 5 rounds of feedback (45 minutes each) the potato is stuck on colour of the button and alignment.
GOD DAMN FUCK! SOMEONE KILL ALL THE MORONS WHO CANNOT UNDERSTAND BASICS AFTER SO MUCH EXPLANATION.
I was really an impatient guy in past but over the years, I developed to be more calm and forgiving. Yet some people manage to get on my every nerve.
How the fuck am I supposed to grow when I am being dragged down instead being with smart colleagues where we can just accelerate to success!!!!1 -
Got my first legit side-gig as a developer (like had to write an SOW and everything): my kids' pediatrician is amazing, but shes switching to a concierge practice, meaning she wont take any insurance, and shes going from about 1500 patients down to about 200. I already pay my mortgage-worth in insurance on a monthly basis, so we were prepared to say adios to her. At my daughter's last appointment, she pulled me aside and said "what can we do to keep you guys as patients?" and i somewhat jokingly suggested "I dunno, need any websites written?"
As a matter of fact, she did: she just fired her practice's web developer, who gave her a shitty wordpress site and fought like hell to avoid any further maintenance or updates for her. She hates the site's current layout (no surprise there) so she is basically giving me full control over a rewrite.
No user logins, no worries about compliance with PII or any of that. Literally just turning a brochure wordpress site into an angular app, hosting it on her own server and eventually building an admin page where she can change the banner text and upload new images.
And my kids will get free, top-notch health care.1 -
(long post is long)
This one is for the .net folks. After evaluating the technology top to bottom and even reimplementing several examples I commonly use for smoke testing new technology, I'm just going to call it:
Blazor is the next Silverlight.
It's just beyond the pale in terms of being architecturally flawed, and yet they're rushing it out as hard as possible to coincide with the .Net 5 rebranding silo extravaganza. We are officially entering round 3 of "sacrifice .Net on the altar of enterprise comfort." Get excited.
Since we've arrived here, I can only assume the Asp.net Ajax fiasco is far enough in the past that a new generation of devs doesn't recall its inherent catastrophic weaknesses. The architecture was this:
1. Create a component as a "WebUserControl"
2. Any time a bound DOM operation occurs from user interaction, send a payload back to the server
3. The server runs the code to process the event; it spits back more HTML
Some client-side js then dutifully updates the UI by unceremoniously stuffing the markup into an element's innerHTML property like so much sausage.
If you understand that, you've adequately understood how Blazor works. There's some optimization like signalR WebSockets for update streaming (the first and only time most blazor devs will ever use WebSockets, I even see developers claiming that they're "using SignalR, Idserver4, gRPC, etc." because the template seeds it for them. The hubris.), but that's the gist. The astute viewer will have noticed a few things here, including the disconnect between repaints, inability to blend update operations and transitions, and the potential for absolutely obliterative, connection-volatile, abusive transactional logic flying back and forth to the server. It's the bring out your dead approach to seeing how much of your IT budget is dedicated to paying for bandwidth and CPU time.
Blazor goes a step further in the server-side render scenario and sends every DOM event it binds to the server for processing. These include millisecond-scale events like scroll, which, at least according to GitHub issues, devs are quickly realizing requires debouncing, though they aren't quite sure how to accomplish that. Since this immediately becomes an issue with tickets saying things like, "scroll event crater server, Ugg need help! You said Blazorclub good. Ugg believe, Ugg wants reparations!" the team chooses a great answer to many problems for the wrong reasons:
gRPC
For those who aren't familiar, gRPC has a substantial amount of compression primarily courtesy of a rather excellent binary format developed by Google. Who needs the Quickie Mart, or indeed a sound markup delivery and view strategy when you can compress the shit out of the payload and ignore the problem. (Shhh, I hear you back there, no spoilers. What will happen when even that compression ceases to cut it, indeed). One might look at all this inductive-reasoning-as-development and ask themselves, "butwai?!" The reason is that the server-side story is just a way to buy time to flesh out the even more fundamentally broken browser-side story. To explain that, we need a little perspective.
The relationship between Microsoft and it's enterprise customers is your typical mutually abusive co-dependent relationship. Microsoft goes through phases of tacit disinterest, where it virtually ignores them. And rightly so, the enterprise customers tend to be weaksauce, mono-platform, mono-language types who come to work, collect a paycheck, and go home. They want to suckle on the teat of the vendor that enables them to get a plug and play experience for delivering their internal systems.
And that's fine. But it's also dull; it's the spouse that lets themselves go, it's the girlfriend in the distracted boyfriend meme. Those aren't the people who keep your platform relevant and competitive. For Microsoft, that crowd has always been the exploratory end of the developer community: alt.net, and more recently, the dotnet core community (StackOverflow 2020's most loved platform, for the haters). Alt.net seeded every competitive advantage the dotnet ecosystem has, and dotnet core capitalized on. Like DI? You're welcome. Are you enjoying MVC? Your gratitude is understood. Cool serializers, gRPC/protobuff, 1st class APIs, metadata-driven clients, code generation, micro ORMs, etc., etc., et al. Dear enterpriseur, you are fucking welcome.
Anyways, b2blazor. So, the front end (Blazor WebAssembly) story begins with the average enterprise FOMO. When enterprises get FOMO, they start to Karen/Kevin super hard, slinging around money, privilege, premiere support tickets, etc. until Microsoft, the distracted boyfriend, eventually turns back and says, "sorry babe, wut was that?" You know, shit like managers unironically looking at cloud reps and demanding to know if "you can handle our load!" Meanwhile, any actual engineer hides under the table facepalming and trying not to die from embarrassment.36 -
Sony.
I don’t *hate* them, but I had really high hopes for Xperia smartphones back then, five years ago.
So I saved up and bought one. That’s what I got:
1. It was getting slower and slower
2. Micro usb broke just months after I got the smartphone
3. Sticky fragile screen with absolutely no oleophobic coating
4. NO UPDATES TO KITKAT AND LOLLIPOP! They just left us behind!
5. The main reason.
I catch moments with my camera. For me, camera is a vital feature, the most significant factor.
I once needed it really urgent and it just said “Camera is unavailable”. And that’s all. Camera is gone forever, broken. Factory reset haven’t fixed it.
You, alongside with Meizu, turned me away from android irreversibly and forever. When I heard about no update, I literally felt abused. Just like a girl whom random fuckboy made a proposal to, fucked and then left just months later.
With that level of customer support, basic respect to me as a user and buyer and that level of quality control, fuck you and your sloppy bricks you call smartphones. Maybe things are changing now, but I don’t care anymore and hardly ever will.
P.S. it heats up as hell, fucking pocket stove3 -
many new updates to skyRant, a devRant Android client! new stuff:
user and blocking of words (such as gpt :)
github integration
rEaL tiMe notifications :P
deep linking
more themes
link preview (image, icon and desc)
german language support
double-tap to vote (rant page)
and even more (this was just the best:))
for watchRant the ability to set your avatar as watchFace has been added!
skyRant GitHub download https://github.com/joewilliams007/...23 -
My first job was 3 years ago.
I was tasked to create feature updates for a referral system.
There were two programmers in that project , both had left the company before I started.
There left no documentation whatsoever. They gave me a copy of user manual as my guide. HAHA!
Half of the code was in code igniter framework(wasn't even familiar with it then), the other half was hard coded.
It was a total nightmare. Wish I had the guts to call it quits then and there. XD10 -
DevRant-Stats Site Update:
Made some changes.
After a long time with no updates, I decided to finish up my DevRant-Stats Project and do all of my Todos.
First, I added a way to request adding a user if he is not found. (Just search for your name, wait, then click "OK")
So even non-DevRant++ are now able to see their stats.
I also added @dfox and @trogus, though there is not a lot of interesting data yet...
Second, I added a "Details" section and changed the "Other" section a bit. For example I'm using an image for "Latest Rant" and other stuff.
Link: https://devrant-stats.github.io/
Just check it out!
Have fun!
~ Skayo11 -
I hate waiting for updates.
Like the time from when it goes public (whether press release or the update itself) to the time I get it? Yeah I hate that.
Roku released the new update, which includes support for Spotify. As a heavy Spotify user, this made me so happy. I got tired of having to plug my laptop into the HDMI port and controlling it with my phone.
But it's coming up on close to a month since it was released that the update would support Spotify and I've got nothing.
I'm too impatient sometimes.5 -
GOD FUCKING DAMN IT!!!
so it seems that instead of windows updating and restarting without user consent, now they ask you every few hours to restart your pc and install ''The newest windows features''. It's insanely annoying! And why the fuck am i receiving updates every single day, sometimes even few times a day. This is way more annoying than windows updating itself every now and then.
Get fucked !!!!!! (whoever thought this is a brilliant idea)4 -
A few days ago our server was compromised due to an outdated Jenkins version. The malicious user installed a crypto miner on the server... The same day that it was found I told management that I'm interested in helping out with the server. Since then, nothing happened... No updates, no security measures, no nothing (except for the removed crypto miner and updated Jenkins software)
Oh well only a matter of time before another hack...
Question to some (who work way way way longer than me) med - seniors, should I make a big deal out of this? And keep pressure on it. Or should I just leave it be and wait for the next comprised server? I know devrant is not a Q&A service, but some dev to dev advice is much appreciated.
- incognito1 -
I really hate PHP frameworks.
I also often write my own frameworks but propriety. I have two decades experience doing without frameworks, writing frameworks and using frameworks.
Virtually every PHP framework I've ever used has causes more headaches than if I had simply written the code.
Let me give you an example. I want a tinyint in my database.
> Unknown column type "tinyint" requested.
Oh, doctrine doesn't support it and wont fix. Doctrine is a library that takes a perfectly good feature rich powerful enough database system and nerfs it to the capabilities of mysql 1.0.0 for portability and because the devs don't actually have the time to create a full ORM library. Sadly it's also the defacto for certain filthy disgusting frameworks whose name I shan't speak.
So I add my own type class. Annoying but what can you do.
I have to try to use it and to do so I have to register it in two places like this (pseudo)...
Types::add(Tinyint::class);
Doctrine::add(Tinyint::class);
Seems simply enough so I run it and see...
> Type tinyint already exists.
So I assume it's doing some magic loading it based on the directory and commend out the Type::add line to see.
> Type to be overwritten tinyint does not exist.
Are you fucking kidding me?
At this point I figure out it must be running twice. It's booting twice. Do I get a stack trace by default from a CLI command? Of course not because who would ever need that?
I take a quick look at parent::boot(). HttpKernel is the standard for Cli Commands?
I notice it has state, uses a protected booted property but I'm curious why it tries to boot so many times. I assume it's user error.
After some fiddling around I get a stack trace but only one boot. How is it possible?
It's not user error, the program flow of the framework is just sub par and it just calls boot all over the place.
I use the state variable and I have to do it in a weird way...
> $booted = $this->booted;parent::boot();if (!$booted) {doStuffOnceThatDependsOnParentBootage();}
A bit awkward but not life and death. I could probably just return but believe or not the parent is doing some crap if already booted. A common ugly practice but one that works is to usually call doSomething and have something only work around the state.
The thing is, doctrine does use TINYINT for bool and it gets all super confused now running commands like updates. It keeps trying to push changes when nothing changed. I'm building my own schema differential system for another project and it doesn't have these problems out of the box. It's not clever enough to handle ambiguous reverse mappings when single types are defined and it should be possible to match the right one or heck both are fine in this case. I'd expect ambiguity to be a problem with reverse engineer, not compare schema to an exact schema.
This is numpty country. Changing TINYINT UNSIGNED to TINYINT UNSIGNED. IT can't even compare two before and after strings.
There's a few other boots I could use but who cares. The internet seems to want to use that boot function. There's also init stages missing. Believe it or not there's a shutdown and reboot for the kernel. It might not be obvious but the Type::add line wants to go not in the boot method but in the top level scope along with the class definition. The top level scope is run only once.
I think people using OOP frameworks forget that there's a scope outside of the object in PHP. It's not ideal but does the trick given the functionality is confined to static only. The register command appears to have it's own check and noop or simply overwrite if the command is issued twice making things more confusing as it was working with register type before to merely alias a type to an existing type so that it could detect it from SQL when reverse engineering.
I start to wonder if I should just use columnDefinition.
It's this. Constantly on a daily basis using these pretentious stuck up frameworks and libraries.
It's not just the palava which in this case is relatively mild compared to some of the headaches that arise. It's that if you use a framework you expect basic things out of the box like oh I don't know support for the byte/char/tinyint/int8 type and a differential command that's able to compare two strings to see if they're different.
Some people might say you're using it wrong. There is such a thing as a learning curve and this one goes down, learning all the things it can't do. It's cripplesauce.12 -
What the hell is WRONG with Windows 10. Why does it need so much storage space? I get to only use 219+38.6+13.8 GiB and Windows gets to use 564 GiB of data to piggyback on data and storage space to push nonsense updates to user who do not want them. Use your own fucking servers, MS. I wish this fucking OS burns in hell.
10 -
Working at a local seo sweat-shop as "whatever the lead dev does't feel like doing" guy.
Inherit their linux "server".
- Over 500 security updates
- Everything in /var/www is chmod to 777
- Everything in /var/www is owned by a random user that isn't apache
- Every single database is owned by root sql user
- Password for sudo user and mysql root user same as wifi password given to everyone at company.
- Custom spaghetti code dashboard with over 400 files in one directory, db/ api logins spread throughout these files, passwords in plain text.
- Dashboard doesn't have passwords, just usernames to login
- Dashboard database has all customer information including credit card stored in plain text
- Company wifi is shared by other businesses in the area
I suggest that I should try to fix some of these things.
Lead Developer / Tech Director : We're an SEO company, not a security company . . .7 -
I've disabled automatic updates on windows 10 long time back. Still they download and updates every time.
Do they have some hidden settings that only can be disabled by a non-linux user?9 -
There are a couple:
A system that updates user accounts to connect them into our wifi system by parsing thousands of processing files written in Clojure. The project was short lived and mainly experimental, It has complete test cases and the jar generated from it is still purring silently on the main application. It was used to replace an $85k vendor application that made no fucking sense. The code has not been touched in 2 years and the jar is still there. The dba mentioned the solution to the vendor, the vendor tried buying it from me, but being that it belongs to the institution nothing was touched, still, it got the VP's attention that I can make programs that would be bought for that level, it caught his attention even more when I showed him the codebase and he recognized a Lisp variant (he is old, and was back in the day a Fortran and Cobol developer)
A small Python categorical ML program that determines certain attributes of user generated data and effectively places them on the proper categories on the main DB. The program generates estimates of the users and the predictions have a 95% correctness rate. The DBA still needs to double check the generated results before doing the db updates. I don't remember how I coded it because I was mostly drunk when I experiment on the scenario. It also got the attention of the VP and director since the web tech manager was apparently doing crazy ML shit that they were not expecting me to do, it made them paranoid that I would eventually leave for a ML role somewhere, still here, but I want more moneys!!
A program that generates PDF documentation from user data, written in Go, Python and Perl (yes Perl) I even got shit from the lead developer since I used languages outside of their current scope of work. Dude had no option but to follow along with it :P since I am his boss
Many more. I am normally proud of my work code. But my biggest moment is my current ntural language processing unit that I am trying to code for my home, but I don't have enough power to build it with my computers, currently, my AI is too stupid, but sometimes it does reply back to my commands and does the things I ask it to do (simple things, opening a browser, search for a song etc) but 7 times out of ten it wont work :P -
I started up my pc and thought by myself lets build an android app and try to teach myself some new skills in android.
*Starts up android studio*
Hi user, i got 116 package updates for you enjoy!
*Turn on updates and starts watching old series to kill time* -
Ok, today's rant brought to you by Microsoft Visual Studio, once again. The updated version I downloaded yesterday now has a weird problem where upon the first run of the emulator, my changes show, but on subsequent runs, no matter how much I change, save, clear cache, restart the emulator, no changes will show in the emulator until I completely restart visual studio! Currently in the process of uninstalling the updated version to download the older version, but again I can't just refresh my PC, because I have to download a version from the developer account downloads. Because the trial version can't be upgraded. This is Microsoft's Flagship Development product running on their flagship OS on a machine with killer specs and the latest updates. GET IT TOGETHER. I would be fired if I released such buggy updates and had such an arduous user experience.1
-
Calling in all Vue devs here! (Possibly any SPA dev actually)
We're building these fancy live-edit fields for our app. It syncs with the database with every keypress (with a debounce, ofc). Now, we're having a global Vuex module to keep track of the applications sync state. Using this module, we can prevent the user from leaving the page if there is data that hasn't been synced. Though, I think I'm doing something wrong here, and not strictly adhering to the "single source of truth"-principle.
When a user has finished typing, a request is made through Axios. When the response arrives, the field issuing the request updates it's display accoring to the response. However, there is also an Axios interceptor which updates the global state to reflect the latest response. Is this wrong? Should the fields themselves emit the mutation to the store? Or is it okay to use an interceptor since they're running down the same call stack?
I think my biggest worry here is that the interceptor and the field will interpret the response differently...
Help is appreciated :D (and thanks for taking the time)18 -
My eyes are bleeding! I've been working on a uni assignment for the last 48 hours on account of being a fucking asshole and leaving it for the last minute... Gotta submit in 12 hours and now I'm here talking shit and ++ing because shit, why not... What a piece of work.3
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I don't care about market cap. Stick your hype-driven business practices up your ass. Infinite growth doesn't exist. I won't read your fucking books and attend your fucking bootcamps and MBAs. You don't have a business model. Selling data is not a business model. Fuck your quick-flip venture capital schemes, and especially fuck your “ethics”.
I will be the first alt-tech CEO. I only care about revenue. The real money, not capitalization bubble vaporware. You don't need a huge fleet of engineers if you're smart about your technology, know how to do architecture, and you're not a feature creep. You don't need venture capital if you don't need a huge fleet of engineers. You don't need to sell data if you don't need venture capital. See? See the pattern here?
My experience allows me to build products on entirely my own. I am fully aware of the limitations of being alone, and they only inspire lean thinking and great architectural decisions. If you know throwing capacity at a problem is not an option, you start thinking differently. And if you don't need to hire anyone, it is very easy to turn a profit and make it sustainable.
If you don't follow the path of tech vaporware, you won't have the problems of tech vaporware, namely distrust of your user base, shitty updates that break everything, and of course “oops, they raised capital, time to leave before things go south”.
A friend of mine went the path I'm talking about, developed a product over the course of four years all alone, reached $10k MRR and sold for $0.8M. But I won't sell. I only care about revenue. If I get to $10k MRR, I will most likely stop doing new features and focus on fixing all the bugs there are and improving performance. This and security patches. Maybe an occasional facelift. That's it. Some products are valued because they don't change, like Sublime Text. The utility tool you can rely on. This is my scheme, this is what I want to do in life. A best-kept secret.
Imagine 100 million users that hate my product but use it because there are no alternatives, 100 people in data enrichment department alone, a billion dollars of evaluation (without being profitable), 10 million twitter followers, and ten VC firms telling me what to do and what data to sell.
Fuck that. I'd rather have one thousand loyal customers and $10k MRR. I'm different, some call it a mental illness, but the bottom line is, my goals are beyond their understanding. They call me crazy. I won't say it was never about the money, of course it was, but inflating your evaluation is not “money”. But the only thing they have is their terrible hustle culture lives and some VC street wisdom, meanwhile I HAVE products, it is on record on my PH. I have POTDs, I have a fucking Golden Kitty nomination on health and fitness for a product I made in one day. Fuck you.6 -
Thank you Google, for updating Chrome on my phone without notice in spite of me explicitly disabling automatic updates and me 'not having enough storage space left' for manual updates. It's nice to see you caring about the user so much.
Now if you sucked my dick while you were at it, that would be great.3 -
When your IT VP starts speaking blasphemy:
"Team,
We all know what’s going on with the API. Next week we may see 6x order volumes.
We need to do everything possible to minimize the load on our prod database server.
Here are some guidelines we’re implementing immediately:
· I’m revoking most direct production SQL access. (even read only). You should be running analysis queries and data pulls out of the replication server anyway.
· No User Management activities are allowed between 9AM and 9PM EST. If you’re going to run a large amount of updates, please coordinate with a DBA to have someone monitoring.
· No checklist setup/maintenance activities are allowed at all. If this causes business impact please let me know.
· If you see are doing anything in [App Name] that’s running long, kill it and get a DBA involved.
Please keep the communication level high and stay vigilant in protecting our prod environment!"
RIP most of what I do at work.3 -
South Africa Release notes version v3.0.2
In 1994 SA underwent one of the biggest system upgrades since 1948. In this new rolling release since the system update called apartheid the system has been annexing resources, locking it down, making it closed source, closing it off community updates and from global updates and minimizing services across the board. On 27 April 1994, the new democratic system update was released with a new system monitor, release resources and balancing efficiency in the system. Though there were remnants of the old code in the system, it was being rewritten by a new generation of users, open source resources were established, giving users the right to choose among themselves how to grow the system , and how to better the experience for all.
In 1999 a new system monitor was created by the users, it wasnt as popular as the ground breaking Madiba release but it was a choice by the community to move forward and grow. The system was stable for a few years, new users were able to develop more on the system, making it more lucrative monetary wise. There were still remnants of the apartheid code but the new generation of developers worked with it making it there own, though they had not yet had admin rights to help change the system, they created a developer culture of their own. A new system resources balancer was introduced called BBEE, that allowed previous disadvantage users more admin rights to other system resources, helping the user base to grow. Though the balancer was biased, and flawed it has helped the system overall to grow and move forward. It has major holes in security and may flood some aspects of the system with more outdated software patches, users have kept it in its system releases until the resource balancer moved the system into a more stable position.
The next interim system monitor release was unexpected, a quiet release that most users did not contribute towards. The system monitor after that nearly brought the system down to a halt, as it was stealing resources from users, using resources for its own gain, and hasn't released any of it back to the system.
The latest user release has been stable. It has brought more interest from users from other countries, it had more monetary advantages than all other releases before. Though it still has flaws, it has tried to balance the system thus far.
Bug report as of 16 Feb 2018
*User experience has been unbalanced since the 1994 release, still leaving some users at a disadvantage.
*The three tier user base that the 1948 release established, creating three main user groups, created a hierarchy of users that are still in effect today, thought the 1994 release tried to balance it out, the user based reversed in its hierarchy, leaving the middle group of users where they were.
*System instability has been at an all time low, allowing users to disable each others accounts, effectively
killing" them off
*Though the infrastructure of the system has been upgraded to global standards ( in some aspects ) expansions are still at an all time low
*Rogue groups of users have been taking most of the infrastructure from established users
*Security services have been heightened among user groups though admins were still able to do as they pleased without being reprimanded
*Female users have been kicked off the system at an alarming rate, the security services have only kicked in recently, but the system admins and system monitor has not done anything about it yet
Bug fixes for a future release:
*Recreating the overall sysadmin team. Removing some admins and bringing others in
*Opening the system more globally to stabilize it more
*Removing and revamping the BBEE system, replacing it with more user documentation, equalizing the user base
*Giving more resources to users that were at a disadvantage during the first release
*Giving the middle group of users more support, documentation and advantages in the system, after removing the security protocols from the user base
*Giving new users who grew up with the post 1994 release more opportunities to help grow the system on a level playing field.
*Establishing the Madiba release principles more efficiently in the current system1 -
The conversations that come across my DevOps desk on a monthly basis.... These have come into my care via Slack, Email, Jira Tickets, PagerDuty alerts, text messages, GitHub PR Reviews, and phone calls. I spend most of my day just trying to log the work I'm being asked to do.
From Random People:
* Employee <A> and Contractor <B> are starting today. Please provision all 19 of their required accounts.
* Oh, they actually started yesterday, please hurry on this request.
From Engineers:
* The database is failing. Why?
* The read-only replica isn't accepting writes. Can you fix this?
* We have this new project we're starting and we need you to set up continuous integration, deployment, write our unit tests, define an integration test strategy, tell us how to mock every call to everything. We'll need several thousand dollars in AWS resources that we've barely defined. Can you define what AWS resources we need?
* We didn't like your definition of AWS resources, so we came up with our own. We're also going to need you to rearchitect the networking to support our single typescript API.
* The VPN is down and nobody can do any work because you locked us all out of connecting directly over SSH from home. Please unblock my home IP.
* Oh, looks like my VPN password expired. How do I reset my VPN password?
* My GitHub account doesn't have access to this repo. Please make my PR for me.
* Can you tell me how to run this app's test suite?
* CI system failed a build. Why?
* App doesn't send logs to the logging platform. Please tell me why.
* How do I add logging statements to my app?
* Why would I need a logging library, can't you just understand why my app doesn't need to waste my time with logs?
From Various 3rd party vendors:
* <X> application changed their license terms. How much do you really want to pay us now?
From Management:
* <X> left the company, and he was working on these tasks that seem closely related to your work. Here are the 3 GitHub Repos you now own.
* Why is our AWS bill so high? I need you to lower our bill by tomorrow. Preferably by 10k-20k monthly. Thanks.
* Please send this month's plan for DevOps work.
* Please don't do anything on your plan.
* Here's your actual new plan for the month.
* Please also do these 10 interruptions-which-became-epic-projects
From AWS:
* Dear AWS Admin, 17 instances need to be rebooted. Please do so by tomorrow.
* Dear AWS Admin, 3 user accounts saw suspicious activity. Please confirm these were actually you.
* Dear AWS Admin, you need to relaunch every one of your instances into a new VPC within the next year.
* Dear AWS Admin, Your app was suspiciously accessing XYZ, which is a violation of our terms of service. You have 24 hours to address this before we delete your AWS account.
Finally, From Management:
* Please provide management with updates, nobody knows what you do.
From me:
Please pay me more. Please give me a team to assist so I'm not a team of one. Also, my wife is asking me to look for a new job, and she's not wrong. Just saying.3 -
This story happened to everyone, and i am sure that if i search, i will find dozens of similar stories, but the different here is, i tried, i really tried, in a hundred different ways to achieve my goal !
When you are stuck on a problem, let's say, that you have a program, project, website ... and need to achieve something technically weird (or hard) and need some help to save you time on experimentations. The first thing a lot of people do is : Google.com && put search dorks.
But, at a moment, google gets "dirty", you use it so often that he always think to know better then you what you are looking for.
It reminds of "Ted", the movie (for thows who know it) where they asked : "Hey ! Why does google always suggest us to look for black dicks ??"
It is exactly what happened to me, i got results who doesn't have anything to do with what i was looking for !
You can give it a try now : type "semantic web RDF to RDB"
You won't find anything, except results related to : NOSQL DBs, which is totally annoying.
Something else, i once google swift to get some updates, what results did i got ? Taylor Swift ... (musician)
I often get 2 or 3 results from google, which made me thinking that i somewhat reached the end of internet, or that people are so dumb that i will have spend hours trying to figure my solutions, but, before doing that, other solutions had to be tested.
1- TOR : Google tracks his users and uses its algos and bullshits to return results as close as possible to the user's demand (big fail ...) so how about moving to a different country ? DL TOR browser, open, setup, go to US, open google (got us version YAY !) enter my keywords, and, nothing, still nothing, more results for sure, but nothing related to what i was looking for.
2- VM
Pop a VM, launch TOR, use Hidden mode, delet all cookies and stuff (it is a new VM but who knows).
Use keywords (now in UK). Here they are !! my results !!! i finally found some decent results about my keywords !
But, i have the required knowledge to do this kind of stuff, but how about people who rely heavily on google ? they can't change country, clear everything, trick google to think you are a new user, they have almost biased and flawed results. I tried duckduckgo (i love them) but they are not that efficient.
Google says not to anything evil, but they ARE EVIL, miss guiding people, suggesting corrections who have nothing to do with the keywords, or results totally unrelated in any way to the keywords while results exist in other countries ???
Ever since, i don't pay attention to google at all, and started thinking that google's algos are manipulating people, i don't know if it is done on purpose or not, but the result is the same, people have biased results based on their country, on their tag, on their ID, and the recent keywords.
During that period i was cursing google every funcking day, and i am still doing it, too much trackers, too much manipulation, i will end-up enclosing myself in darknet.4 -
I just started a new job last week. Old-school sysadmin role for a pretty old-school company, but the pay is nice and the kids've gotta eat.
They gave me a windows laptop. I haven't used windows for work or as a daily driver since 2016, and now, a week into trying to make this machine work for me, I have the following observations to report.
WSL is nice. It's nice to have it installed(though actually installing it was an adventure unto itself), and to set alacritty to open my default user prompt straight into that is very nice. As terminal emulators are by far my most used piece of software, that's nice to have.
Command-line software management through powershell, winget, and chocolatey are also very nice.
I like the accessibility offered by autohotkey, though there is something of a learning curve on it. Once I get better with it, I suspect that what follows will be largely mitigated.
The Bad:
In general, Windows is janky. It feels like it's all kinda taped together without any particular cohesion in mind. As a desktop, it feels decidedly amateur, compared to the feature-mountain polish of MacOS, and especially compared to the flexibility and infinite possibilities of Linux.
Lots of screen real estate is wasted, with window decorations, and fonts that look terrible at smaller sizes, because the antialiasing of fonts is just terrible. Almost all the features I depend on in other desktops: ad-hoc searches and launches(alfred, rofi) are-- again --janky. They work, but they typically require more typing than alfred or rofi. I admit I haven't spent weeks on this problem yet, but I haven't found a workable solution yet with wox, hain, and keypirinha. Quick searches like what you get with alfred, alfred workflows, and the swiss army knife that is rofi, just aren't possible or reliable with the tools I've used so far, and most require some kind of indexing agent to fully function.
It beggars imagination that a desktop in which users are subjected to "default apps" that is purported to be acceptable for enterprise, professional use, does not have a default entry for text editor. I installed nvim-qt, and I want to use it to edit anything and everything I ever edit with text, but all too often, apps have hard-coded instructions to open text files with notepad.
I want to open certain URLs with firefox, certain ones with firefox developer edition, and others with vivaldi, and yet there is not an app available that I have seen yet in my searches that allows me to set this kind of configuration. I found one that's supposed to, but it just ignores everything I put into its config, and just opens MS Edge for everything. Jank.
Simple things take too long. Like the delay between when I laboriously hit ctrl-alt-del to bring up the login and when the actual text field appears, and the delay between that and when I want to start using the computer.
Changing some settings requires a reboot. Updating some software requires a reboot. Updating permissions on something sometimes requires a reboot. And those are all on top of the frequent requests to reboot for updates.
I would have thought Windows would have overcome most of the issues that create these problems, but it's just, as I said, amateur.1 -
There must be a simple, reliable, compatible, battery efficient way to poll an api every ten minutes and send user a notification, right?
AlarmManager : Ok. But who cares about battery anyways?
Google cloud messaging : Ok, you can have battery efficiency. But who lives without Google anyways?
JobScheduler : Ok, but you need Lollipop. Which Android phone doesn't get updates? Oh wait, shit.6 -
How I envision the package maintainer for gstreamer, every time they're getting ready to push updates, knowing that the end user will have to spend the next 35 minutes in front of their bash console, watching each package build...
1 -
Microsoft ends support for Windows 7
Support for Windows 7 ended this week which means that security or software updates will no longer be provided by Microsoft.
Windows 7 will continue to run however it will be more vulnerable to viruses and malware. The best way to remain secure is to use the latest operating system available.
Microsoft have a dedicated webpage for user questions, next steps and detailed advice. 👇
https://microsoft.com/en-gb/...1 -
!dev
I've finally been so agitated at G+ I need somewhere to just vent.
So for context. What I'm talking about is Google+, or more specifically, the Android app. The website is bad in its own way, but that's not here nor there. No opinions on the iOS version, as I simply REFUSE to touch iOS.
So anyways. The platform itself honestly is not bad. With competent developers behind it, and them actually listening to their dwindling fucking userbase, they could easily turn it into something successful, but the issue is that they just aren't
You see, it's almost like they change dev staff every 6 or so months. Why do I believe this? Because the GUI changes about that fucking often. They also have a history of forcing updates, but allowing you to use an older version, just horrifically slapping on a new and unwelcome skin. This isn't an isolated practice by any means, but it's by far the most prevalent here.
So, now a list of some of the issues the current version has:
-After about a week, the app becomes unstably slow, to the point of it taking about a minute to refresh your home feed, or an individual page.
-Searching is never good, always being slow and rarely giving you who you asked for.
-Transparency is non fucking existent. There isn't a development roadmap to speak of, and when something happens we get it second hand from staff in a "G+ help" community.
There is a solution for the first one, going and clearing the data/cache, but really, the end user shouldn't have to regularly do that. Not to mention the storage space Google apps IN GENERAL fucking take up. Why does Google Play Services regularly use 250MB? (For most people, this really isn't much. But when you only get to fucking use 4 GB of internal storage it's a giant fuck you.)
Bah, back to the topic at hand.
There isn't a good solution to searching, or for transparency at the moment.
The spam filter is awful as well. REGULARLY letting obvious spam pass, regularly blocking and filtering genuine users. It's real annoying that the Android app itself doesn't have support for seeing these flags outside of rooting through the settings a bit, but still. The web and iOS versions have this already.
Oh, it also completely lacks a dark mode like most Google apps for some fuckin reason.
That concludes my random 1:30 AM rant about something I have no ability to change, except hope in vain that someone who has the ability to change this forwards this to the developers of G+.
I need a better sleep schedule.3 -
Life of a middle class PC user in India
*Downloads update of 8 GB takes 5 days*
Next day opens PC to use
*Mandatory update of 3 GB required*
Fuck these updates8 -
Is there a good way to refresh user permissions in an ASP.MVC app? Right now our solution is to save the updates and have the user close out of their browser/clear the cache so the updates can take place but wonder if there's a way to refresh the application itself.1
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Pamac.
I like it. It's simple and better than that "discover" software center thing.
But omg do I hate pamac. Not even talking about what it caused to the AUR. I'm talking about automatic full system updates.
It's so annoying. I'm working on something, have like 20 open windows where I'm doing something. I just need that ONE app to continue. So I install it using pamac, boom. 2GB of updates and I can't even skip it. Alright, I wait.
When it finally finished I tried continuing with what I was doing, but nah. Some nvidia driver update broke my stuff and I have to reboot my system.
That's very annoying. Remember, I still have all my work open, including one app which takes a stupid amount of setup when starting. I really don't wanna have to reboot at that point. But I have to.
So I open the "windows button menu" (don't know the name, but you know what I mean) and click restart. It gives me an error. Probably updated some critical thing relating to the reboot menu which broke it.
(I know I can just use the terminal to reboot, but before I do I had to make this post.)
This isn't a one time thing. This has happened to me twice before. What really makes me mad is that I can't turn full updates off. There would be a really simple fix to all of this:
When installing an app, check for updates and just ask the user if they want to update everything, or just install this app now (and update the dependencies for it).
I understand that I have to update my system, but just let me finish my work first, okay? Just update when I'm done. It would also be nice to have an extra button for "Update and shutdown" without going the Windows route and forcing updates.
While I'm on the topic of windows, I used Windows 8 once on a laptop belonging to a family member. I was in the proccess of doing something when it just blacked out, stopped all apps and started installing updates. Not even a warning. That's just one of the reasons I'll never even consider switching to Windows.
(Using Arch with KDE btw.)6
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