Me brute forcing into the appartment (where i rent my room) modem:

*tries all most easy/logical combinations*

Nope.

*tries more difficult ones*

Nope.

*hmm.... no please not both just blank....... 😷*

Admin access granted.

😩

Well, here's the OS rant I promised. Also apologies for no blog posts the past few weeks, working on one but I want to have all the information correct and time isn't my best friend right now :/

Anyways, let's talk about operating systems. They serve a purpose which is the goal which the user has.
So, as everyone says (or, loads of people), every system is good for a purpose and you can't call the mainstream systems shit because they all have their use.

Last part is true (that they all have their use) but defining a good system is up to an individual. So, a system which I'd be able to call good, had at least the following 'features':
- it gives the user freedom. If someone just wants to use it for emailing and webbrowsing, fair enough. If someone wants to produce music on it, fair enough. If someone wants to rebuild the entire system to suit their needs, fair enough. If someone wants to check the source code to see what's actually running on their hardware, fair enough. It should be up to the user to decide what they want to/can do and not up to the maker of that system.
- it tries it's best to keep the security/privacy of its users protected. Meaning, by default, no calling home, no integrating users within mass surveillance programs and no unnecessary data collection.
- Open. Especially in an age of mass surveillance, it's very important that one has the option to check the underlying code for vulnerabilities/backdoors. Can everyone do that, nope. But that doesn't mean that the option shouldn't be there because it's also about transparency so you don't HAVE to trust a software vendor on their blue eyes.
- stability. A system should be stable enough for home users to use. For people who like to tweak around? Also, but tweaking *can* lead to instability and crashes, that's not the systems' responsibility.

Especially the security and privacy AND open parts are why I wouldn't ever voluntarily (if my job would depend on it, sure, I kinda need money to stay alive so I'll take that) use windows or macos. Sure, apple seems to care about user privacy way more than other vendors but as long as nobody can verify that through source code, no offense, I won't believe a thing they say about that because no one can technically verify it anyways.

Some people have told me that Linux is hard to use for new/(highly) a-technical people but looking at my own family and friends who adapted fast as hell and don't want to go back to windows now (and mac, for that matter), I highly doubt that. Sure, they'll have to learn something new. But that was also the case when they started to use any other system for the first time. Possibly try a different distro if one doesn't fit?

Problems - sometimes hard to solve on Linux, no doubt about that. But, at least its open. Meaning that someone can dive in as deep as possible/necessary to solve the problem. That's something which is very difficult with closed systems.

The best example in this case for me (don't remember how I did it by the way) was when I mounted a network drive at boot on windows and Linux (two systems using the same webDav drive). I changed the authentication and both systems weren't in for booting anymore. Hours of searching how to unfuck this on windows - I ended up reinstalling it because I just couldn't find a solution.
On linux, i found some article quite quickly telling to remove the entry for the webdav thingy from fstab. Booted into a root recovery shell, chrooted to the harddrive, removed the entry in fstab and rebooted. BAM. Everything worked again.

So yeah, that's my view on this, I guess ;P

!(short rant)

Look I understand online privacy is a concern and we should really be very much aware about what data we are giving to whom. But when does it turn from being aware to just being paranoid and a maniac about it.? I mean okay, I know facebook has access to your data including your whatsapp chat (presumably), google listens to your conversations and snoops on your mail and shit, amazon advertises that you must have their spy system (read alexa) install in your homes and numerous other cases. But in the end it really boils down to "everyone wants your data but who do you trust your data with?"

For me, facebook and the so-called social media sites are a strict no-no but I use whatsapp as my primary chating application. I like to use google for my searches because yaa it gives me more accurate search results as compared to ddg because it has my search history. I use gmail as my primary as well as work email because it is convinient and an adv here and there doesnt bother me. Their spam filters, the easy accessibility options, the storage they offer everything is much more convinient for me. I use linux for my work related stuff (obviously) but I play my games on windows. Alexa and such type of products are again a big no-no for me but I regularly shop from amazon and unless I am searching for some weird ass shit (which if you want to, do it in some incognito mode) I am fine with coming across some advs about things I searched for. Sometimes it reminds me of things I need to buy which I might have put off and later on forgot. I have an amazon prime account because prime video has some good shows in there. My primary web browser is chrome because I simply love its developer tools and I now have gotten used to it. So unless chrome is very much hogging on my ram, in which case I switch over to firefox for some of my tabs, I am okay with using chrome. I have a motorola phone with stock android which means all google apps pre-installed. I use hangouts, google keep, google map(cannot live without it now), heck even google photos, but I also deny certain accesses to apps which I find fishy like if you are a game, you should not have access to my gps. I live in India where we have aadhar cards(like the social securtiy number in the USA) where the government has our fingerprints and all our data because every damn thing now needs to be linked with your aadhar otherwise your service will be terminated. Like your mobile number, your investment policies, your income tax, heck even your marraige certificates need to be linked with your aadhar card. Here, I dont have any option but to give in because somehow "its in the interest of the nation". Not surprisingly, this thing recently came to light where you can get your hands on anyone's aadhar details including their fingerprints for just ₹50($1). Fuck that shit.

tl;dr
There are and should be always exceptions when it comes to privacy because when you give the other person your data, it sometimes makes your life much easier. On the other hand, people/services asking for your data with the sole purpose of infilterating into your private life and not providing any usefulness should just be boycotted. It all boils down to till what extent you wish to share your data(ranging from literally installing a spying device in your house to them knowing that I want to understand how spring security works) and how much do you trust the service with your data. Example being, I just shared most of my private data in this rant with a group of unknown people and I am okay with it, because I know I can trust dev rant with my posts(unlike facebook).

!dev
> Get on Deutsche Bahn train
> Train delayed
> Miss Eurostar connection (not just me, many people did too), get the next one
> Building works in Brussels Station
> Maps inaccurate
> Get lost
> Find Eurostar terminal
> Electricity failure
> Check-in suspended
> After 40min, announcement
> This train cancelled, get the next one
> Electricity fixed
> Check in, finally
> Now 2½ trains worth of people need to get on this one
> Somehow fit on train
> Lose table because family needs it (fair, but annoying)
> Train departs
> More delays due to scheduling conflict
> Arrive in Lille Europe
> Stop for 10 minutes for no reason
> Announcement: "there is an illegal passenger on board, everyone and their luggage needs to get off"
> Get off train, stand on platform for a decade
> "Who has left an orange bag on coach 18?"
> Nobody
> They bring the bag out
> It's red, not orange
> "Oh it's mine, sorry" - some woman
> Wait around for ages
> "Everybody go downstairs and go through security again"
> Go through security and passport control
> Get back on train
> Arrive at St. Pancreas
> Last train to where I live has gone
> Woohoo, I get to pay for an expensive hotel in London
> Get rail replacement bus service home
> Home 😒

Worst code review experience?

Hard to pick just one, but most were in a big meeting room with 4+ other developers not related to the project and with some playing Monday-Morning-Quarterback instead of offering productive feedback.

In one code review, the department mgr reviewed the code from a third party component library.

<brings up the code on the big screen>
Mgr: "I can't read any of this, its a mix of English and something else."
Me: "Its German."
Mgr: "Then why is 'Button' in English? This code is a mess."
Me: "I'm not exactly sure how I should respond, I mean, I didn't write any of this code."
Mgr: "Yes, but you are using it, so it's fair game for a code review."
Me: "Its not really open source, but we can make requests if you found something that needs to be addressed."
Mgr: "Oh yes, all this...whatever this is..<pointing again to the German>"
Me: "I don't think they will change their code to English just so you can read it."
Mgr: "We paid good money, you bet your ass they'll change it!"
Me: "I think the components were like $30 for the unlimited license. They'll tell us to go to hell first. Is there something about my code you want to talk about?"
Mgr: "<Ugggh>...I guess not, I couldn't get past all that German. Why didn't we go with an American company? Hell, why didn't we just write these components ourselves!?"
Me: "Because you gave a directive that if we found components that saved us time, to put in a request, and you approved the request. The company is American, they probably outsourced or hired German developers. I don't know and not sure why we care."
Mgr: "Security! What if they are sending keystrokes back to their servers!"
Me: "Did you see any http or any network access?"
Mgr: "How could I? The code is in German!"
Monday-Morning-Quarterback1: "If it were me, I would have written the components myself and moved on"
Me: "No, I don't think you could for less than $30"
Monday-Morning-Quarterback2: "Meh...we get paid anyway. Just add the time to the estimate."
Mgr: "Exactly! Why do we even have developers who can't read this mess."
Me: "Oh good Lord! Did anyone review or even look at my code for this review!?"
<silence>
Mgr: "Oh...ok...I guess we're done here. Thanks everyone."
<everyone starts to leave>
Me: "Whoa!...wait a sec..am I supposed to do something?"
Mgr: "Get that company to write their code in English so we can read it. You have their number, call em'...no...wait...give me their number. You keep working, I'll take care of this personally"

In they nicest way possible, the company did tell him to go to hell.

The solution for this one isn't nearly as amusing as the journey.

I was working for one of the largest retailers in NA as an architect. Said retailer had over a thousand big box stores, IT maintenance budget of $200M/year. The kind of place that just reeks of waste and mismanagement at every level.

They had installed a system to distribute training and instructional videos to every store, as well as recorded daily broadcasts to all store employees as a way of reducing management time spend with employees in the morning. This system had cost a cool 400M USD, not including labor and upgrades for round 1. Round 2 was another 100M to add a storage buffer to each store because they'd failed to account for the fact that their internet connections at the store and the outbound pipe from the DC wasn't capable of running the public facing e-commerce and streaming all the video data to every store in realtime. Typical massive enterprise clusterfuck.

Then security gets involved. Each device at stores had a different address on a private megawan. The stores didn't generally phone home, home phoned them as an access control measure; stores calling the DC was verboten. This presented an obvious problem for the video system because it needed to pull updates.

The brilliant Infosys resources had a bright idea to solve this problem:

- Treat each device IP as an access key for that device (avg 15 per store per store).
- Verify the request ip, then issue a redirect with ANOTHER ip unique to that device that the firewall would ingress only to the video subnet
- Do it all with the F5

A few months later, the networking team comes back and announces that after months of work and 10s of people years they can't implement the solution because iRules have a size limit and they would need more than 60,000 lines or 15,000 rules to implement it. Sad trombones all around.

Then, a wild DBA appears, steps up to the plate and says he can solve the problem with the power of ORACLE! Few months later he comes back with some absolutely batshit solution that stored the individual octets of an IPV4, multiple nested queries to the same table to emulate subnet masking through some temp table spanning voodoo. Time to complete: 2-4 minutes per request. He too eventually gives up the fight, sort of, in that backhanded way DBAs tend to do everything. I wish I would have paid more attention to that abortion because the rationale and its mechanics were just staggeringly rube goldberg and should have been documented for posterity.

So I catch wind of this sitting in a CAB meeting. I hear them talking about how there's "no way to solve this problem, it's too complex, we're going to need a lot more databases to handle this." I tune in and gather all it really needs to do, since the ingress firewall is handling the origin IP checks, is convert the request IP to video ingress IP, 302 and call it a day.

While they're all grandstanding and pontificating, I fire up visual studio and:

- write a method that encodes the incoming request IP into a single uint32
- write an http module that keeps an in-memory dictionary of uint32,string for the request, response, converts the request ip and 302s the call with blackhole support
- convert all the mappings in the spreadsheet attached to the meetings into a csv, dump to disk
- write a wpf application to allow for easily managing the IP database in the short term
- deploy the solution one of our stage boxes
- add a TODO to eventually move this to a database

All this took about 5 minutes. I interrupt their conversation to ask them to retarget their test to the port I exposed on the stage box. Then watch them stare in stunned silence as the crow grows cold.

According to a friend who still works there, that code is still running in production on a single node to this day. And still running on the same static file database.

#TheValueOfEngineers

I think we're going two sides:

For one, more and more technology is being developed/engineered which is even more and more and more intrusive as for personal privacy, I'm genuinely worried how this'll go as privacy isn't just a about not exposing certain things like passwords/bank account details and so on, it's also about being an individual who has their own thoughts, opinions and so on. If we keep taking that away more and more often, society will change and go towards the Orwell scenario (we're on our way there right now). We can change this as software/design/server engineers but that's up to us and I sadly don't see that happening quickly, also due to the 'nothing to hide' bullshit.

Second one is that were going more and more towards open source.
This is a good thing as this:
- gives freedom to devs around the world to improve software and/or modify it to suit their needs.
- gives people the opportunity to look through the source code of softwares in order to verify it as for backdoors and find security vulnerabilities which otherwise can remain hidden for the general public while spying agencies have way more resources to go vulnerability hunting.

For the people who think this isn't a good idea (even more open source), without it we'd be completely fucked as for moving forward/security/privacy. (I can give examples if wanted).

GIT LOG VERSION 101
----------------
75fed18 pay no attention to the man behind the curtain
56772ff added security.
6374fdd needs more cow bell
6b27de9 Committing fixes in the dark, seriously, who killed my power!?
bffce8a giggle.
7e93977 Refactored configuration.
e66c495 pgsql is more strict, increase the hackiness up to 11
5690dd9 Revert "just testing, remember to revert"
daa84ba Still can't get this right...
097f164 this should fix it
367f271 GIT :/
f46d735 bump to 0.0.3-dev:wq
b893721 ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
24be0d9 ...
f014a0c ALL SORTS OF THINGS
e648b80 added super-widget 2.0.
3a71628 perfect...
e2a8cb1 Fucking templates.
b08e489 pgsql is more strict, increase the hackiness up to 11

It took forever to get SSH access to our office network computers from outside. Me and other coworkers were often told to "just use teamviewer", but we finally managed to get our way.

But bloody incompetents! There is a machine with SSH listening on port 22, user & root login enabled via password on the personal office computer.

"I CBA to setup a private key. It's useless anyways, who's ever gonna hack this computer? Don't be paranoid, a password is enough!"

A little more than 30 minutes later, I added the following to his .bashrc:

alias cat="eject -T && \cat"
alias cp="eject -T && \cp"
alias find="eject -T && \find"
alias grep="eject -T && \grep"
alias ls="eject -T && \ls"
alias mv="eject -T && \mv"
alias nano="eject -T && \nano"
alias rm="eject -T && \rm"
alias rsync="eject -T && \rsync"
alias ssh="eject -T && \ssh"
alias su="eject -T && \su"
alias sudo="eject -T && \sudo"
alias vboxmanage="eject -T && \vboxmanage"
alias vim="eject -T && \vim"

He's still trying to figure out what is happening.

> Worst work culture you've experienced?

It's a tie between my first to employers.

First: A career's dead end.
Bosses hardly ever said the truth, suger-coated everything and told you just about anything to get what they wanted. E.g. a coworker of mine was sent on a business trip to another company. They had told him this is his big chance! He'd attend a project kick-off meeting, maybe become its lead permanently. When he got there, the other company was like "So you're the temporary first-level supporter? Great! Here's your headset".

And well, devs were worth nothing anyway. For every dev there were 2-3 "consultants" that wrote detailed specifications, including SQL statements and pseudocode. The dev's job was just to translate that to working code. Except for the two highest senior devs, who had perfect job security. They had cooked up a custom Ant-based build system, had forked several high-profile Java projects (e.g. Hibernate) and their code was purposely cryptic and convoluted.
You had no chance to make changes to their projects without involuntarily breaking half of it. And then you'd have to beg for a bit of their time. And doing something they didn't like? Forget it. After I suggested to introduce automated testing I was treated like a heretic. Well of course, that would have threatened their job security. Even managers had no power against them. If these two would quit half a dozen projects would simply be dead.

And finally, the pecking order. Juniors, like me back then, didn't get taught shit. We were just there for the work the seniors didn't want to do. When one of the senior devs had implemented a patch on the master branch, it was the junior's job to apply it to the other branches.

Second: A massive sweatshop, almost like a real-life caricature.
It was a big corporation. Managers acted like kings, always taking the best for themselves while leaving crumbs for the plebs (=devs, operators, etc). They had the spacious single offices, we had the open plan (so awesome for communication and teamwork! synergy effects!). When they got bored, they left meetings just like that. We... well don't even think about being late.
And of course most managers followed the "kiss up, kick down" principle. Boy, was I getting kicked because I dared to question a decision of my boss. He made my life so hard I got sick for a month, being close to burnout. The best part? I gave notice a month later, and _he_still_was_surprised_!
Plebs weren't allowed anything below perfection, bosses on the other hand... so, I got yelled at by some manager. Twice. For essentially nothing, things just bruised his fragile ego. My bosses response? "Oh he's just human". No, the plebs was expected to obey the powers that be. Something you didn't like? That just means your attitude needs adjustment. Like with the open plan offices: I criticized the noise and distraction. Well that's just my _opinion_, right? Anyone else is happily enjoying it! Why can't I just be like the others? And most people really had given up, working like on a production line.

The company itself, while big, was a big ball of small, isolated groups, sticking together by office politics. In your software you'd need to call a service made by a different team, sooner or later. Not documented, noone was ever willing to help. To actually get help, you needed to get your boss to talk to their boss. Then you'd have a chance at all.

Oh, and the red tape. Say you needed a simple cable. You know, like those for $2 on Amazon. You'd open a support ticket and a week later everyone involved had signed it off. Probably. Like your boss, the support's boss, the internal IT services' boss, and maybe some other poor sap who felt important. Or maybe not, because the justification for needing that cable wasn't specific enough. I mean, just imagine the potential damage if our employees owned a cable they shouldn't!

You know, after these two employers I actually needed therapy. Looking back now, hooooly shit... that's why I can't repeat often enough that we devs put up with way too much bullshit.

After a few weeks of being insanely busy, I decided to log onto Steam and maybe relax with a few people and play some games. I enjoy playing a few sandbox games and do freelance development for those games (Anywhere from a simple script to a full on server setup) on the side. It just so happened that I had an 'urgent' request from one of my old staff member from an old community I use to own. This staff member decided to run his own community after I sold mine off since I didn't have the passion anymore to deal with the community on a daily basis.

O: Owner (Former staff member/friend)
D: Other Dev

O: Hey, I need urgent help man! Got a few things developed for my server, and now the server won't stay stable and crashes randomly. I really need help, my developer can't figure it out.
Me: Uhm, sure. Just remember, if it's small I'll do it for free since you're an old friend, but if it's a bigger issue or needs a full recode or whatever, you're gonna have to pay. Another option is, I tell you what's wrong and you can have your developer fix it.
O: Sounds good, I'll give you owner access to everything so you can check it out.
Me: Sounds good

*An hour passes by*

O: Sorry it took so long, had to deal with some crap. *Insert credentials, etc*
Me: Ok, give me a few minutes to do some basic tests. What was that new feature or whatever you added?
O: *Explains long feature, and where it's located*
Me: *Begins to review the files* *Internal rage wondering what fucking developer could code such trash* *Tests a few methods, and watches CPU/RAM and an internal graph for usage*
Me: Who coded this module?
O: My developer.
Me: *Calm tone, with a mix of some anger* So, you know what, I'm just gonna do some simple math for ya. You're running 33 ticks a second for the server, with an average of about 40ish players. 33x60 = 1980 cycles a minute, now lets times that by the 40 players on average, you have 79,200 cycles per minute or nearly 4.8 fucking cycles an hour (If you maxed the server at 64 players, it's going to run an amazing fucking 7.6 million cycles an hour, like holy fuck). You're also running a MySQLite query every cycle while transferring useless data to the server, you're clusterfucking the server and overloading it for no fucking reason and that's why you're crashing it. Another question, who the fuck wrote the security of this? I can literally send commands to the server with this insecure method and delete all of your files... If you actually want your fucking server stable and secure, I'm gonna have to recode this entire module to reduce your developer's clusterfuck of 4.8 million cycles to about 400 every hour... it's gonna be $50.
D: *Angered* You're wrong, this is the best way to do it, I did stress testing! *Insert other defensive comments* You're just a shitty developer (This one got me)
Me: *Calm* You're calling me a shitty developer? You're the person that doesn't understand a timer, I get that you're new to this world, but reading the wiki or even using the game's forums would've ripped this code to shreds and you to shreds. You're not even a developer, cause most of this is so disorganized it looks like you copy and pasted it. *Get's angered here and starts some light screaming* You're wasting CPU usage, the game can't use more than 1 physical core, and after a quick test, you're stupid 'amazing' module is using about 40% of the CPU. You need to fucking realize the 40ish average players, use less than this... THEY SHOULD BE MORE INTENSIVE THAN YOUR CODE, NOT THE OPPOSITE.
O: Hey don't be rude to Venom, he's an amazing coder. You're still new, you don't know as much as him. Ok, I'll pay you the money to get it recoded.
Me: Sounds good. *Angered tone* Also you developer boy, learn to listen to feedback and maybe learn to improve your shitty code. Cause you'll never go anywhere if you don't even understand who bad this garbage is, and that you can't even use the fucking wiki for this game. The only fucking way you're gonna improve is to use some of my suggestions.
D: *Leaves call without saying anything*

TL;DR: Shitty developer ran some shitty XP system code for a game nearly 4.8 million times an hour (average) or just above 7.6 million times an hour (if maxed), plus running MySQLite when it could've been done within about like 400 an hour at max. Tried calling me a shitty developer, and got sorta yelled at while I was trying to keep calm.

Still pissed he tried calling me a shitty developer...

Wow so much hate for WordPress. Le me to the rescue 💀

Yes WP is bloated and crappy and full of security issues etc etc. Agreed. That doesn't mean it is useless though.

It is alright to use for someone who is not really good with web, someone who just needs a blog, someone who just needs a home page, about page and contact form with a possibility of updating photo and text once or two times a month.

It is not suitable for e-commerce nor lots of transactions/forms involving websites.

As long as you know what kind of horse/vehicle you are on, you won't end up in the dirt.

We support a system we inherited from another company, it’s an online document store for technical specifications of electronic devices used by loads of people.

This thing is the biggest pile of shite I’ve ever seen, it wasn’t written by developers but rather by civil engineers who could write vb...so needless to say it’s classic asp running on iis, but it’s not only written in vbscript oh god no, some of it is vb other parts is jscript (Microsoft’s janky old JavaScript implementation) and the rest is php.

When we first inherited it we spent the best part of 2 months fixing security vulnerabilities before we were willing to put it near the internet - to this day I remain convinced the only reason it was never hacked is that everything scanning it thought it was a honeypot.

We’ve told the client that this thing needs put out of its misery but they insist on keeping it going. Whenever anything goes wrong it falls to me and it ends up taking me days to work out what’s happening with it. So far the only way I’ve worked out how to debug it is to start doing “Response.AddHeader(‘debug’, ‘<thing>’) on the production site and looking at the header responses in the browser.
I feel dirty doing that but it works so I don’t really care at this point

FUCK I hate this thing!

Open source is poison, hoax and source of much troubles.

Even as I love OSS, and I use it a lot, when things go south, they go south terribly.

There was "security" updates in one OSS program I have been using, that accidentally prevented use cases which specifically affected me. I raised bug report, made issue and gave small repro for it.
One of the core developers acknowledges that yes, this is problem, and could be handled with few added options, which users of similar use case could use to keep things working. He then tags issue "needs help" and disappears.
After I have waited some time, I ask help how I could fix it myself, like how to setup proper dev environment for that tool. Asked it in their forums few days later, as issue didn't get any response. Then asked help in their slack, as forums didn't get any help.

Figured out how to get dev environment up, fix done (~4 lines changed, adding simple check for option enabled or not) and figured out how to test that this works.
I create pull request to project, checking their CONTRIBUTING and following instructions there. Then I wait. I wait two weeks, and then one of the core develors goes to add label "needs response from maintainer". That is now almost two weeks ago...

So, bug that appeared in October, and issue that was created October 8th, is still not fixed, even as there is fix in PR for 28 days this far.

And what really ticks me off? People who make statements like: "it is OSS, have you thought of contributing and fixing things yourself?" when we run into problems with open source software.

Making fix yourself ain't biggest problem... but getting it actually applied seems to be biggest roadblock. This kind of experiences doesn't really encourage me to spend time fixing bugs in OSS, time is often better spend changing to different tool, or making changes in my own workflow or going around problem some kludge way.

I try to get business starting, and based on OSS tools. But my decision is staggering, as I had also made decision to contribute back to OSS... but first experiences ain't that encouraging.

Currently, OSS feels like cancer.

I'll try to pay back some smaller credit by one large credit...

Hence I need to contact the banks and get one (!) fucking frigging stupid piece of paper which lists the account number and the amount of money I need to pay back.

Sounds simple ...

Well.

One bank just answered my email request by sending me that piece of paper. Except they didn't have any validation of my identity.

Yes. They answered the request of 'I want to pay back the credit in full, can u send me the necessary documents?' (more formal of course) with confidential data without any more credibility than my email address.

YAY.

Another bank requests a telephone call for identity validation and sending back a signed form via postal service...

Another bank just needs a PDF sent via mail with an electric signature (yeah. They were aware of what that means - I was shocked and confused) or a "qualified signature matching previous documents" (translated from German).

The last one offers a WhatsApp number - send a GIF / JPG or video and we answer directly.

I need to reach a higher state than drunk.

It's not funny to know how confidential data gets mistreated by companies who should have the highest security.

Have you ever gotten a task where you have to modify some existing code, and to get it to work the way it needs to you have to write some ugly ass code?

And I'm talking FUGLY ass code. The kind where every brain cell you have screams to refactor it all so that your code won't be so ugly and you can live with yourself. But you only wrote it that way because some numbnuts who was fired a year ago designed it that way, and left zero commentary or documentation on his reasoning ("sELf-dOcUmeNtiNg cOde, bRuH!").

It doesn't pose any sort of risk with regards to security or resource management or efficiency, or really even faulty logic. It just looks fucking awful, my brain can instantly see better ways to design it and I don't want history to tie my name to it.

But also the system is being gutted and retired within a matter of months, so maintenance won't even be a concern; and you know that you have a lot of other large tasks that need your attention too, and to refactor will ultimately prove to be a time sink.

I mean ultimately, I know what I need to do, but I guess it's a pride thing. Just makes me feel icky.

My work product: Or why I learned to get twitchy around Java...

I maintain a Java based test system, that tests a raster image processor. The client is a Java swing project that contains CORBA bindings to the internal API of the raster image processor. It also has custom written UI elements and duplicated functionality that became available in later versions of Java, but because some of the third party tools we use don't work with later versions of Java for some reason, it's not possible to upgrade Java to gain things as simple as recursive directory deletion, yes the version of Java we have to use does not support something as simple as that and custom code had to be written to support it.

Because of the requirement to build the API bindings along with the client the whole application must be built with the raster image processor build chain, which is a heavily customised jam build system. So an ant task calls out to execute a jam task and jam does about 90% of the heavy lifting.

In addition to the Java code there's code for interpreting PostScript files, as these can be used to alter the behaviour of the raster image processor during testing.

As if that weren't enough, there's a beanshell interface to allow users to script the test system, but none of the users know Java well enough to feel confident writing interpreted Java scripts (and that's too close to JavaScript for my comfort). I once tried swapping this out for the Rhino JavaScript interpreter and got all the verbal support in the world but no developer time to design an API that'd work for all the departments.

The server isn't much better though. It's a tomcat based application that was written by someone who had never built a tomcat application before, or any web application for that matter and uses raw SQL strings instead of an orm, it doesn't use MVC in any way, and insane amount of functionality is dumped into the jsp files.

It too interacts with a raster image processor to create difference masks of the output, running PostScript as needed. It spawns off multiple threads and can spend days processing hundreds of gigabytes of image output (depending on the size of the tests).

We're stuck on Tomcat seven because we can't upgrade beyond Java 6, which brings a whole manner of security issues, but that eager little Java updated will break the tool chain if it gets its way.

Between these two components we have the Java RMI server (sometimes) working to help generate image data on the client side before all images are pulled across a UNC network path onto the server that processes test jobs (in PDF format), by reading into the xref table of said PDF, finding the embedded image data (for our server consumed test files are just flate encoded TIFF files wrapped around just enough PDF to make them valid) and uses a tool to create a difference mask of two images.

This tool is very error prone, it can't difference images of different sizes, colour spaces, orientations or pixel depths, but it's the best we have.

The tool is installed in both the client and server if the client can generate images it'll query from the server which ones it needs to and if it can't the server will use the tool itself.

Our shells have custom profiles for linking to a whole manner of third party tools and libraries, including a link to visual studio 2005 (more indirectly related build dependencies), the whole profile has to ensure that absolutely no operating system pollution gets into the shell, most of our apps are installed in our home directories and we have to ensure our paths are correct for every single application we add.

And... Fucking and!

Most of the tools are stored as source bundles in a version control system... Not got or mercurial, not perforce or svn, not even CVS... They use a custom built version control system that is built on top of RCS, it keeps a central database of locked files (using soft and hard locks along with write protecting the files in the file system) to ensure users can't get merge conflicts by preventing other users from writing to the files at all.

Branching is heavy weight and can take the best part of a day to create a new branch and populate the history.

Gathering the tools alone to build the Dev environment to build my project takes the best part of a week.

What should be a joy come hardware refresh year becomes a curse ("Well fuck, now I loose a week spending it setting up the Dev environment on ANOTHER machine").

Needless to say, I enjoy NOT working with Java. A lot of this isn't Javas fault, but there's a lot of things that Java (specifically the Java 6 version we're stuck on) does not make easy.

This is why I prefer to build my web apps in python or node, hell, I'd even take Lua... Just... Compiling web pages into executable Java classes, why? I mean I understand the implementation of how this happens, but why did my predecessor have to choose this? Why?

I’m having this issue for the online marketplace I’m working on the side. It’s blockchain tech where you can purchase normal goods and services(no, not like Amazon or Fiverr, eww, this one’s more inclined with promoting organic growth for small businesses and freelancers).

I’m stuck with what solution is in the best interest of the user and the business for the long-term.

The dilemma about anonymity, online freedom and privacy is yes, it protects users from predators and attackers, but then, it’s harder for authorities to hunt down people who uses platforms for malicious intent, and also, digital footprint is helpful during litigation as evidence.

You don’t know who to trust.

-There is nothing to differentiate normal users with spammers, scammers, etc.
-There is no accountability for if they break the rules. They can easily delete and create a new account.

Platforms, communities big or small are plagued with these.
There are a lot of people out there who would rather project their insecurities on other people than to seek therapy.

Also, how platforms uses psychology tricks to make platforms addicting, it’s safe to assume that it’s bound to get toxic. Fixation on these platforms, leads to other needs being neglected or people forget to stay present.

Another thing, automated moderation is not that effective as there are still biases in data and human verification is still required. But then, human moderators get exposed to extreme violence, gore, etc that leads to poor mental health. (see Facebook got sued by moderators)

Also, I’ve had a recent experience where some unstable dev was stalking and harassing me. During that turmoil, I’ve found the many loopholes in every platform out there and how crappy their support is. Like they’ll just say, “make your account more secure”, bitch it’s your platform not providing enough security, your blocking feature means nothing coz anyone can still create accounts and message anyone.
It happened like February-August (it ended coz I quit going online and made private all my accounts). UGH I MISS ALL MY FRIENDS THO. FUCK THAT DUDE. He deserves to be in jail TBH

Lol if this product booms, now u know the back story lololol

{
-i won't follow logging practices
-i won't follow secure coding
-i won't leverage profiling n monitoring tools
-i won't reuse best practices
-i won't listen to thought leaders
-i will outsource writing UT
-i will outsource code quality checks
-i will outsource all testing
-i will ignore n overide CTO team

But I still want high stability, security n 4 9s availability. Just want it done. My team is best. Am a fast-track leadership program leader who never has or ever needs to cod. I just know ...
}

People I have to deal with every sprint. Site reliability is not easy ...
Teaching good code makes great products to morons, toughest ...

"Beginners mind needed"

i am so fucking conflicted right now. seeing my fiture getting ruined in front of my present eyes. Life always gives me a chance to jump out of a ship that's about to fucking blow , i took it the first time, but this time i missed it for bravery ( and stupidity), and now am sinking alongside this fucking ship

my first job was amazing. decent work, sometimes a lot and sometimes too less. i would learn new things ,interact with people, handle a lot of fuckups . at one point i felt like looking for another opportunity , got one giving 50% hike , so i jumped the ship and sent a resignation letter. the noitice peripd was less, so i enjoyed my days applying to other ships. got even a better offer with 100% hike, so from one boat to another to now a literal cruise.

later i got to know that my original company got bankrupt and fired 85% staff. the next month the company that gave me the first offer layed off 30% staff.

now the waters are tough and my cruise is also getting impacted. but instead of firing, they are asking us to come to the office permanently. their office is in a fucked up place: you need 8$ just to breath the fucking air there. its the city of blood and money. and you will be giving away both things there.

my brain got split into 2 parts after this announcement: my stupid self was still considering this while my sensible self started applying for jobs. my stupid self was thinking that this is a great opportunity to leave my fucking nest of a home , where i am liv8ng woth my parents for last 25 years, and learn to live alone. clean utensils, cook food , wash clothes... i wanted to live the life the harsh way.

but life still took a pity on the fool that j am and gave me an opportunity. an opportunity to work with a big brand who hasn't done any layoffs in their 40+ yrs of existence (but also known for giving shit increments)
the offer was just a 40% hike but it was near my home. i could be in office in 1 hr in less than a dollar a day and still earn more than what am earning now.

plus my notice period is now 60 days , so who knows what other offer i could have got in those 60 days ( when i would keep my profile with a big green "immediately available to hire" circle on me.

however this time i didn't jump the boat. i asked them for a bigger raisez they declined and my stupid self was more than happy.
now the company has started to send mails regarding relocation and yepp the cruise is sinking , atleast for me. if i was savingsx in this company, my savings would become x/8 if i go to that city. in the new offer it would have at worst remained x.

and that's not even half of what's bothering me. i had accepted the money loss in exchange of what that city and my company had to offer : a chance to experience WFO, a chance to live life like a mature man and not a kid in his mom's house ,and a life full of hurdles and strangers.

however i always like to keep an emergency fallback mechanism on me , for if things don't work out. I don't wanna go depressed and cut my wrists there, I don't want people to hurt me so much that I can't recover. i want to run away from that wreched city the moment i start to loose the battles there and the city starts taking over me.

but what the holy fuck? my company's notice period is 60 days, and my rented room's security deposit is 6 fucking months? i will be giving 6 months of deposit + 1 month of brokerage + 1month of rent on the first day i put my steps on that wretched land after travelling in a 100 dollar flight! where am i supposed to get this much money?!
and okay, somehow i manage this. say i did an 11 months agreement, paid the fucking 8 months of rent at one go and simply started living a shitty life there. in month 2 i break down and wanted to implement my escape mechanism. it would go like this : i will suck up and try to live for rent free for next 6 months. but wait, THAT'S NOT FUCKING ALLOWED!! iam supposed to get my security AFTER 11+1 MONTHS!! why not freaking adjust it in my rent?

I can't think straight . 6 months of security deposit has blown my brain. i am regretting anything and everything. I can't think of my roommates situation, home safety, room location, whatever the fucks we think while looking for a room . all i can think is ...WHY SO MUCH MONEY NEEDS TO GO AT ONCE!?

FUCK

Persisterising derived values. Often a necessary evil for optimisation or privacy while conflicting with concerns such as auditing.

Password hashing is the common example of a case considered necessary to cover security concerns.

Also often a mistake to store derived values. Some times it can be annoying. Sometimes it can be data loss. Derived values often require careful maintenance otherwise the actual comments in your database for a page is 10 but the stored value for the page record is 9. This becomes very important when dealing with money where eventual consistency might not be enough.

Annoying is when given a and b then c = a + b only b and c are stored so you often have to run things backwards.

Given any processing pipeline such as A -> B -> C with A being original and C final then you technically only need C. This applies to anything.

However, not all steps stay or deflate. Sum of values is an example of deflate. Mapping values is an example of stay. Combining all possible value pairs is inflate, IE, N * N and tends to represent the true termination point for a pipeline as to what can be persisted.

I've quite often seen people exclude original. Some amount of lossy can be alright if it's genuine noise and one way if serving some purpose.

If A is O(N) and C reduces to O(1) then it can seem to make sense to store only C until someone also wants B -> D as well. Technically speaking A is all you ever need to persist to cater to all dependencies.

I've seen every kind of mess with processing chains. People persisting the inflations while still being lossy. Giant chains linear chains where instead items should rely on a common ancestor. Things being applied to only be unapplied. Yes ABCBDBEBCF etc then truncating A happens.

Extreme care needs to be taken with data and future proofing. Excess data you can remove. Missing code can be added. Data however once its gone its gone and your bug is forever.

This doesn't seem to enter the minds of many developers who don't reconcile their execution or processing graphs with entry points, exist points, edge direction, size, persistence, etc.

I don't get keycloak. Anyone who has experience with it, please help.

We have what I would think is a common setup: a kubernetes cluster with a Spring boot api-gateway and keycloak as oauth2-provider.

The api-gateway needs an issuer-uri to keycloak for endpoint discovery, i.e. to configure a bunch of endpoints to keykloak for different purposes.

The two main purposes are: 1. to redirect the user to keycloak (must be an url reachable from outside the cluster, i.e. ingress) 2. to authenticate tokens directly with keycloak from within the cluster.

Keycloak can be configured to set some of these discovery endpoints to different values. Specifically it makes a separation between backfacing (system calls in cluster) and frontfacing (user call from browser) urls All seems good.

However, when using this setup, each time spring security authenticates a token against keycloak it says the "issuer" is invalid. This is because the issuer is the host on which the token was generated. This host was the one in the url which the user was redirected to i.e. the ingress.

It feels like there is no way around this except running keycloak outside the Kubernetes cluster, but surely there must be a way to run keycloak in the same cluster. What else is the purpose of keycloak having the concept of back- and frontfacing urls?