Oh, man, I just realized I haven't ranted one of my best stories on here!

So, here goes!

A few years back the company I work for was contacted by an older client regarding a new project.

The guy was now pitching to build the website for the Parliament of another country (not gonna name it, NDAs and stuff), and was planning on outsourcing the development, as he had no team and he was only aiming on taking care of the client service/project management side of the project.

Out of principle (and also to preserve our mental integrity), we have purposely avoided working with government bodies of any kind, in any country, but he was a friend of our CEO and pleaded until we singed on board.

Now, the project itself was way bigger than we expected, as the wanted more of an internal CRM, centralized document archive, event management, internal planning, multiple interfaced, role based access restricted monster of an administration interface, complete with regular user website, also packed with all kind of features, dashboards and so on.

Long story short, a lot bigger than what we were expecting based on the initial brief.

The development period was hell. New features were coming in on a weekly basis. Already implemented functionality was constantly being changed or redefined. No requests we ever made about clarifications and/or materials or information were ever answered on time.

They also somehow bullied the guy that brought us the project into also including the data migration from the old website into the new one we were building and we somehow ended up having to extract meaningful, formatted, sanitized content parsing static HTML files and connecting them to download-able files (almost every page in the old website had files available to download) we needed to also include in a sane way.

Now, don't think the files were simple URL paths we can trace to a folder/file path, oh no!!! The links were some form of hash combination that had to be exploded and tested against some king of database relationship tables that only had hashed indexes relating to other tables, that also only had hashed indexes relating to some other tables that kept a database of the website pages HTML file naming. So what we had to do is identify the files based on a combination of hashed indexes and re-hashed HTML file names that in the end would give us a filename for a real file that we had to then search for inside a list of over 20 folders not related to one another.

So we did this. Created a script that processed the hell out of over 10000 HTML files, database entries and files and re-indexed and re-named all this shit into a meaningful database of sane data and well organized files.

So, with this we were nearing the finish line for the project, which by now exceeded the estimated time by over to times.

We test everything, retest it all again for good measure, pack everything up for deployment, simulate on a staging environment, give the final client access to the staging version, get them to accept that all requirements are met, finish writing the documentation for the codebase, write detailed deployment procedure, include some automation and testing tools also for good measure, recommend production setup, hardware specs, software versions, server side optimization like caching, load balancing and all that we could think would ever be useful, all with more documentation and instructions.

As the project was built on PHP/MySQL (as requested), we recommended a Linux environment for production. Oh, I forgot to tell you that over the development period they kept asking us to also include steps for Windows procedures along with our regular documentation. Was a bit strange, but we added it in there just so we can finish and close the damn project.

So, we send them all the above and go get drunk as fuck in celebration of getting rid of them once and for all...

Next day: hung over, I get to the office, open my laptop and see on new email. I only had the one new mail, so I open it to see what it's about.

Lo and behold! The fuckers over in the other country that called themselves "IT guys", and were the ones making all the changes and additions to our requirements, were not capable enough to follow step by step instructions in order to deploy the project on their servers!!!

[Continues in the comments]

Call internet provider to ask about a problem :
costumer service: in order to help you, I need to know what windows version do you use, Windows 8, windows 7...
Me: I use linux
Costumer service : I'm sorry, we don't provide support to Windows Linux

Hello everyone, found this place recently, decided to bore you with one (or many) Navy story... tech Navy story. I'll start from the end.
Little backstory: I've deployed a simple domain setup on the ship I served, nothing fancy, a server, a switch, 10 computers, all Windows (details on that at another rant). I enter the ship Monday morning, and the XO tells me that he can't access his online folders.
OK, I say, I'll get to it. I fire up my laptop, try to RDP to the server (I know, I know, burn me at the stake later) no connection. WTF? Is the service down? I try pinging. No luck. I tried pinging the switch. OK. Looking at the switch admin panel, I see the server's port is dead. "OK, probably the cable." (we have old ethernet cables)
So, I drag my ass over to the server (same room with ship comms) with the cable tester to confirm that. What do I see?
The IMBECILES had pulled the plug from the server so that they could charge their mobile phones. I literally slammed my head against the door (calming exercise in case of spontaneous murder impulses - the things you learn at the Academy). My CO was nearby, and lucky for the guys, he heard me yell at them, while throwing mobiles and chargers around.
"But we thought it was OK, we just wanted to charge our-"
I kid you not, I reached for the firefighter's axe.
My CO grabbed me by the collar and dragged me to his room. I explained to him (between two cigarettes) that we MUST get a UPS and a server cabinet (budget constraints in the military are something that will give you people nightmares, trust me). I carefully explained to him that unless we got those, nothing would prevent the next moron from destroying confidential data and me from murdering him.
I plugged in and booted the server, after installing a multi socket extension. Two days after, surprise surprise, the server was off again. That was the first time I opened the door to the CO's room with a low kick. I must have looked like a psycho on drugs, he gave approval for the purchase in twenty seconds flat.
After that, I installed the UPS and the cabinet. Everything went inside, from the UPS to the very plugs. Just a locked box with cables coming out.
One of the guys came to my room, and asked if I could unlock the cabinet so that they could plug a "device" they needed.
I actually reached for my folding knife.
Disclaimer: The story above is TRUE. Even the almost violent parts.

Linux sucks.

Now now, chill. I'm using it as my main OS for a few years now. I know what I'm talking and this title is a bit click-baity, but this just has to go out there:

1. It's usable as a Windows replacement just fine - FALSE. XFCE4 is years old and buggy as hell especially on multi-monitor set-up, Gnome3 gets stuck more often than my Windows 98 machine used to, KDE is like a rich kid on meth. Plug in Bluetooth headphones? Well no, sorry, you have to research that online, since you'll probably need to install some packages for it to work. Did I say "work"? Well no, because after more research you realize that Debian on Gnome3 on gdm3 launches pulseaudio on its own, so you have 2 instances of pulseaudio, and one of them is stealing your headphones sometimes and you either have no sound or shitty sound. How do I know that you ask? The same way I know everything else - every time you try to do something new on any Linux, it involves a ton of research. Exciting research, don't get me wrong, but at this point it looks more like a toy than a reliable desktop computer operating system.

2. And why am I using pulseaudio? Why not alsa? years ago people were discussing on forums that pulseaudio is old and dead, yet here we are with new LTS release of Ubuntu still shining with Pulseaudio. How about several different service management systems being deprecated by new ones, each having different configurations and calling methods? Apparently systemd is old and lame now. It's a mix of 10 year old software that works badly, with a 5 year old replacement that works worse, somehow trying to live under the same roof. Does it work? Ask my headphones who sound like a fucking dial-up modem.

3. Let's talk about displays, shall we? xorg is old and deprecated, right? We got Wayland that's mostly stable. Don't know what that is? That's just basic knowledge for Linux. And when you try to install network-manager, it also tries to install Mir toolkits. Because why the fuck not install 3 display managers when you want a network manager, of which one is old and dying, one is young and stupid, and another is an infant that died of cancer?

4. Want to integrate with Google Drive? Yeah, there's a tool that mounts the drive as a local directory. Yeah only for Ubuntu. Want it on Debian? You need to compile it. Oh wait, it's on Ocaml, because fuck mainstream languages, we're hipsters. How do you compile Ocaml? Well you need to have Ocaml on your system, dummy. How do you do that? Well you need to compile Ocaml. Ok, how do I do that? Well, git clone, download and install some dependencies, configure, make... oh sorry, you're using libssl1.0.2g when you need libssl1.0.1f, nope, sorry, won't work. Want to install libssl1.0.1f? Why? You already have the "g", stupid! Want to remove libssl1.0.2g? Bye-bye literally everything that you have on your PC. But at least you got the "f". Does it work now? Well no, because you need libssl1.0.2g for another dependency to work.
And all I ever wanted was to get a fucking document from google drive (not nudes, I promise).

5. Want to watch a movie? Let me tear that screen in half and make the bottom half late by a couple of frames, because who needs vertical sync, right? Oh you do? Well install the native drivers maybe. Oh you have? Welcome to eternal Boot to Recovery mode, motherfucka!

---------------------------------

Yeah, most of the times things work just fine. But the reason I know what those things are and how they work is not curiosity. The reason that I know the inner workings of Linux much better than the inner workings of Windows, is because in those few years that I've been using it full time, it has caused me 10 times more headache than I have ever experienced with other systems. And it's not the usual annoyances like "OMG it rebooted when I didn't ask it to", but more like "Oh, it won't work and I need 2 days to find out why" kind of stuff, because even if you experience the same thing again, it's always caused by some new shit and the old solution won't work any more.

I still love it, and will continue to use it. I don't know why really. Maybe because I'm not afraid of fucking it up any more? Maybe because I can do what I want in it and recovering will be easier than on Windows?
It's a toy for me, after all these years. And I also use it for professional reasons.

But whenever someone presents it as a better alternative to Windows, I just want to puke.

Navy story time, and this one is lengthy.
As a Lieutenant Jr. I served for a year on a large (>100m) ship, with the duties of assistant navigation officer, and of course, unofficial computer guy. When I first entered the ship (carrying my trusty laptop), I had to wait for 2 hours at the officer's wardroom... where I noticed an ethernet plug. After 15 minutes of waiting, I got bored. Like, really bored. What on TCP/IP could possibly go wrong?
So, scanning the network it is. Besides the usual security holes I came to expect in ""military secure networks"" (Windows XP SP2 unpatched and Windows 2003 Servers, also unpatched) I came along a variety of interesting computers with interesting things... that I cannot name. The aggressive scan also crashed the SMB service on the server causing no end of cute reactions, until I restarted it remotely.
But me and my big mouth... I actually talked about it with the ship's CO and the electronics officer, and promptly got the unofficial duty of computer guy, aka helldesk, technical support and I-try-to-explain-you-that-it-is-impossible-given-my-resources guy. I seriously think that this was their punishment for me messing around. At one time I received a call, that a certain PC was disconnected. I repeatedly told them to look if the ethernet cable was on. "Yes, of course it's on, I am not an idiot." (yea, right)
So I went to that room, 4 decks down and 3 sections aft. Just to push in the half-popped out ethernet jack. I would swear it was on purpose, but reality showed me I was wrong, oh so dead wrong.
For the full year of my commission, I kept pestering the CO to assign me with an assistant to teach them, and to give approval for some serious upgrades, patching and documenting. No good.
I set up some little things to get them interested, like some NMEA relays and installed navigation software on certain computers, re-enabled the server's webmail and patched the server itself, tried to clean the malware (aka. Sisyphus' rock), and tried to enforce a security policy. I also tried to convince the CO to install a document management system, to his utter horror and refusal (he was the hard copy type, as were most officers in the ship). I gave up on almost all besides the assistant thing, because I knew that once I left, everything would go to the high-entropy status of carrying papers around, but the CO kept telling me that would be unnecessary.
"You'll always be our man, you'll fix it (sic)".
What could go wrong?
I got my transfer with 1 week's notice. Panic struck. The CO was... well, he was less shocked than I expected, but still shocked (I learned later that he knew beforehand, but decided not to tell anybody anything). So came the most rediculous request of all:
To put down, within 1 A4 sheet, and in simple instructions, the things one had to do in order to fulfil the duties of the computer guy.
I. SHIT. YOU. NOT.
My answer:
"What I can do is write: 'Please read the following:', followed by the list of books one must read in order to get some introductory understanding of network and server management, with most accompanying skills."
I was so glad I got out of that hellhole.

We have a customer that runs an extremely strict security program, which disallows any type of outside connection to their servers.
In order to even correspond with them via email you must undergo background checks and be validated. Then you sign an NDA and another "secrecy level" contract.

Today they had a problem, I was the one assigned to fix it. I asked for a screenshot.
We already use an encrypted mail service, which runs via a special VPN that has enough layers of protection to slow down a photon to the speed of a snail.
The customer's sysadmin encrypted the screenshot and sent it to me.

I open the screenshot and....
He runs Windows 10, uses Google Chrome and has Facebook's WhatsApp desktop app flashing orange in the tray.

😐😣😫😖

Had this with a relative. His laptop wasn't turning on, with or without charger so he brought it back to the store to fix it. It ran elementary os by the way (detail for later). Then he got it back after a week and we booted it and it had windows 8 installed (wtf indeed). So we called the service desk to ask about it since the issue was a broken charger (!!!). Their reply: oh yeah there was a weird system installed on it so we thought we'd reset it as well for you.

SERIOUSLY, THAT'S NOT YOUR FUCKING JOB!!

He is not tech savvy and he didn't know much about backups so that was literally about one year of work GONE. Yeah, I setup a cloud backup sync thingy for him right after that.

!(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).

The list would be quite long.

I think Google is still making good tools, but just like Apple the integrations get all so tight and constricting... And with their data, if it goes wrong, it will go wrong hard.

I feel like YouTube is gliding into a state where cheap clickbait floats to the top and finding quality gets more difficult as well, their algorithm is more and more tuned to choose recent popular stuff over good older gems.

Microsoft is all pretend lovey dovey cuddling open source, but I'm still suspicious it's all a hug of death. I was never a big fan, but they're seriously dropping balls when it comes to windows-as-a-service, taking away so much personal control from end users even though they can't be trusted to babysit either.

Amazon is creeping it's way through the internet, charging $10/m to join the vip club infesting houses with spytubes to sell more plastic crap. Bezos' only right to keep wasting oxygen is BlueOrigin, but he'll probably fuck that up as well turning spaceflight into a decadent prime consumer orgy instead of something inspiring.

Facebook... Well, that's self explanatory. Fuck it, everything it pretends to be, and everyone who still has an account with a rusty spike.

Uber and AirBnB, with their fake ass mission of a green shared economy, but they trample over employees, customers and neighbors to build their ivory towers of progressive illusions.

Then there's a million declining brands.

I liked Skype for example when it was first released, Just like how I started out liking (and then hating) Discord, Slack, etc... They're all tools which seem fast and easy, but then they get us further away from solid protocols, get us entrenched into limiting, bloated and sometimes even dangerous tools. As my dad used to say: "Companies are like women, if you go for cheap, fast and easy you'll end up with a burning dick and half your savings gone"

You know what, fuck all tech companies.

OK, devrant is still pretty nice... For now.

Most ignorant ask from a PM or client?

So, so many. How do I chose?

- Wanting to 'speed up' a web site that we did not own, in Sweden (they used a service I wrote). His 'benchmark' was counting "one Mississippi, two Mississippi" while the home page rendered on his home PC and < 1MB DSL connection (he lives in a rural area).
- Wanted to change the sort order of a column of report so it 'sometimes' sorted on 'ABC' (alpha) or '123' (numeric) and sometimes, a mix of both. His justification was if he could put the data in the order he wanted in Excel, the computer should be smart enough to do the same thing.
- Wanted a Windows desktop application to run on an android.
- Wanted to write the interface to a new phone system that wasn't going to be installed for months. Even though we had access to the SDK, he didn't understand the SDK required access to the hardware. For several weeks he would send emails containing tutorials on interfacing with COM libraries (as if that was my problem).
- Wanted to write a new customer support application in XML. I told him I would have the application written tomorrow if he could tell me what XML stands for.

There's this one Windows PC, hiding in the darkest corner of the office, just running a network service all day. Suddenly the service is not available any longer... Opening explorer.exe to see what's up with the machine, while wiping a thick layer of dust from the screen: Zero bytes free memory on C:\ ...

Assuming that some log files have caused all the occupied space. NOPE! Instead, Windows update just installed a shitton of updates. They all failed, of course... After not being able to simply remove them, deciding to uninstall some programs and kill Windows update. Finally 800MB of free space!

Suddenly stumbling over a Visual Studio 2008 installation. Who the hell installed this on the PC? Absolute bullshit. Nevermind. Uninstall this shite.

The uninstaller takes ages to do anything, then aborts the uninstallation showing the popup "there is not enough space to uninstall". Looking into the memory indicator: 0 bytes left. DAAAAFUUUQ Microsoft??? WTFFFFFFF?!? 800MB to UNINSTALL Visual Studio? Are you for real???

Ended up force-deleting the directory: 3 Gigs free now...

"Thank you for choosing Microsoft!"

No Microsoft, I really didn't choose you. This crappy hardware made you the inevitable, not a choice.

And like hell do I want to run your crappy shit OS. I tried to reset my PC, got all my programs removed (because that's obviously where the errors are, not the OS, right? Certified motherfuckers). Yet the shit still didn't get resolved even after a reset. Installing Windows freshly again, because "I chose this".

Give me a break, Microshaft. If it wasn't for your crappy OS, I would've gone to sleep hours ago. Yet me disabling your shitty telemetry brought this shit upon me, by disabling me to get Insider updates just because I added a registry key and disabled a service. Just how much are you going to force data collection out of your "nothing to hide, nothing to fear" users, Microsoft?

Honestly, at this point I think that Microsoft under Ballmer might've been better. Because while Linux was apparently cancer back then, at least this shitty data collection for "a free OS" wasn't yet a thing back then.

My mother still runs Vista, an OS that has since a few months ago reached EOL. Last time she visited me I recommended her to switch to Windows 7, because it looks the same but is better in terms of performance and is still supported. She refused, because it might damage her configurations. Granted, that's probably full of malware but at this point I'm glad she did.

Even Windows 7 has telemetry forcibly enabled at this point. Vista may be unsupported, but at least it didn't fall victim to the current status quo - data mining on every Microshaft OS that's still supported.

Microsoft may have been shady ever since they pursued manufacturers into defaulting to their OS, and GPU manufacturers will probably also have been lobbied into supporting Windows exclusively. But this data mining shit? Not even the Ballmer era was as horrible as this. My mother may not realize it, but she unknowingly avoided it.

The tech stack at my current gig is the worst shit I’ve ever dealt with...

I can’t fucking stand programs, especially browser based programs, to open new windows. New tab, okay sure, ideally I just want the current tab I’m on to update when I click on a link.

Ticketing system: Autotask
Fucking opens up with a crappy piss poor sorting method and no proper filtering for ticket views. Nope you have to go create a fucking dashboard to parse/filter the shit you want to see. So I either have to go create a metric-arse tonne of custom ticket views and switch between them or just use the default turdburger view. Add to that that when I click on a ticket, it opens another fucking window with the ticket information. If I want to do time entry, it just feels some primal need to open another fucking window!!! Then even if I mark the ticket complete it just minimizes the goddamn second ticket window. So my jankbox-supreme PC that my company provided gets to strugglepuff along trying to keep 10 million chrome windows open. Yeah, sure 6GB of ram is great for IT work, especially when using hot steaming piles of trashjuice software!

I have to manually close these windows regularly throughout the day or the system just shits the bed and halts.

RMM tool: Continuum
This fucker takes the goddamn soggy waffle award for being utterly fucking useless. Same problem with the windows as autotask except this special snowflake likes to open a login prompt as a full-fuck-mothering-new window when we need to open a LMI rescue session!!! I need to enter a username and a password. That’s it! I don’t need a full screen window to enter credentials! FUCK!!! Btw the LMI tools only work like 70% of the time and drag ass compared to literally every other remote support tool I’ve ever used. I’ve found that it’s sometimes just faster to walk someone through enabling RDP on their system then remoting in from another system where LMI didn’t decide to be fully suicidal and just kill itself.

Our fucking chief asshat and sergeant fucknuts mcdoogal can’t fucking setup anything so the antivirus software is pushed to all client systems but everything is just set to the default site settings. Absolutely zero care or thought or effort was put forth and these gorilla spunk drinking, rimjob jockey motherfuckers sell this as a managed AntiVirus.

We use a shitty password manager than no one besides I use because there is a fully unencrypted oneNote notebook that everyone uses because fuck security right? “Sometimes it’s just faster to have the passwords at the ready without having to log into the password manager.” Chief Asshat in my first week on the job.

Not to mention that windows server is unlicensed in almost every client environment, the domain admin password is same across multiple client sites, is the same password to log into firewalls, and office 365 environments!!!

I’ve brought up tons of ways to fix these problems, but they have their heads so far up their own asses getting high on undeserved smugness since “they have been in business for almost ten years”. Like, Whoop Dee MotherFucking Doo! You have only been lucky to skate by with this dumpster fire you call a software stack, you could probably fill 10 olympic sized swimming pools to the brim with the logarrhea that flows from your gullets not only to us but also to your customers, and you won’t implement anything that is good for you, your company, or your poor clients because you take ten minutes to try and understand something new.

I’m fucking livid because I’m stuck in a position where I can’t just quit and work on my business full time. I’m married and have a 6m old baby. Between both my wife and I working we barely make ends meet and there’s absolutely zero reason that I couldn’t be providing better service to customers without having to lie through my teeth to them and I could easily support my family and be about 264826290461% happier!

But because we make so little, I can’t scrap together enough money to get Terranimbus (my startup) bootstrapped. We have zero expendable/savable income each month and it’s killing my soul. It’s so fucking frustrating knowing that a little time and some capital is all that stands between a better life for my family and I and being able to provide a better overall service out there over these kinds of shady as fuck knob gobblers.

*tries to SSH into my laptop to see how that third kernel compilation attempt went*
… From my Windows box.

Windows: aah nope.

"Oh God maybe the bloody HP thing overheated again"
*takes laptop from beneath the desk indent*
… Logs in perfectly. What the hell... Maybe it's SSH service went down?

$ systemctl status sshd
> active (running)

Well.. okay. Can I log in from my phone?

*fires up Termux*
*logs in just fine*

What the fuck... Literally just now I added the laptop's ECDSA key into the WSL known_hosts by trying to log into it, so it can't be blocked by that shitty firewall (come to think of it, did I disable that featureful piece of junk yet? A NAT router * takes care of that shit just fine Redmond certified mofos).. so what is it again.. yet another one of those fucking WanBLowS features?!!

condor@desktop $ nc -vz 192.168.10.30 22
Connection to 192.168.10.30 22 port [tcp/ssh] succeeded!

ARE YOU FUCKING FOR REAL?!

Fucking Heisen-feature-infested piece of garbage!!! Good for gaming and that's fucking it!

Edit: (*) this assumes that your internal network doesn't have any untrusted hosts. Public networks or home networks from regular users that don't audit their hosts all the time might very well need a firewall to be present on the host itself as well.

I die, go to hell and my punishment is to write software for hell network that is having power problems due to light source disruptions and is running on Windows 95 on FAT32 without any service pack.

Network speed is trough 300bps dial up modem. Protocol is over IPX/SPX.

My task is to write interactive websites that are replacement of modern websites but in VBScript, ActiveX, IE 4.0.

I have 10 managers that tell me what to do and scream when I miss deadline that is set everyday without my knowledge at random times.

They send me an email and 5 minutes later they arrive at my desk to ask me about it.

I must work 16 hours a day before I can leave the place and if I won’t show up police beats me and escorts me to the office.
If I’m late a second I don’t get payment.
I can’t afford to rent a place so I sleep in the sleeping bag.

It doesn’t matter much cause as soon as I fall asleep phone rings until I wake up and my manager screams about the problems he have for about an hour.

Unaware that this had been occurring for while, DBA manager walks into our cube area:

DBAMgr-Scott: "DBA-Kelly told me you still having problems connecting to the new staging servers?"
Dev-Carl: "Yea, still getting access denied. Same problem we've been having for a couple of weeks"
DBAMgr-Scott: "Damn it, I hate you. I got to have Kelly working with data warehouse project. I guess I've got to start working on fixing this problem."
Dev-Carl: "Ha ha..sorry. I've checked everything. Its definitely something on the sql server side."
DBAMgr-Scott: "I guess my day is shot. I've got to talk to the network admin, when I get back, lets put our heads together and figure this out."
<Scott leaves>
Me: "A permissions issue on staging? All my stuff is working fine and been working fine for a long while."
Dev-Carl: "Yea, there is nothing different about any of the other environments."
Me: "That doesn't sound right. What's the error?"
Dev-Carl: "Permissions"
Me: "No, the actual exception, never mind, I'll look it up in Splunk."
<in about 30 seconds, I find the actual exception, Win32Exception: Access is denied in OpenSqlFileStream, a little google-fu and .. >
Me: "Is the service using Windows authentication or SQL authentication?"
Dev-Carl: "SQL authentication."
Me: "Switch it to windows authentication"
<Dev-Carl changes authentication...service works like a charm>
Dev-Carl: "OMG, it worked! We've been working on this problem for almost two weeks and it only took you 30 seconds."
Me: "Now that it works, and the service had been working, what changed?"
Dev-Carl: "Oh..look at that, Dev-Jake changed the connection string two weeks ago. Weird. Thanks for your help."
<My brain is screaming "YOU NEVER THOUGHT TO LOOK FOR WHAT CHANGED!!!"
Me: "I'm happy I could help."

I've found and fixed any kind of "bad bug" I can think of over my career from allowing negative financial transfers to weird platform specific behaviour, here are a few of the more interesting ones that come to mind...

#1 - Most expensive lesson learned

Almost 10 years ago (while learning to code) I wrote a loyalty card system that ended up going national. Fast forward 2 years and by some miracle the system still worked and had services running on 500+ POS servers in large retail stores uploading thousands of transactions each second - due to this increased traffic to stay ahead of any trouble we decided to add a loadbalancer to our backend.

This was simply a matter of re-assigning the IP and would cause 10-15 minutes of downtime (for the first time ever), we made the switch and everything seemed perfect. Too perfect...

After 10 minutes every phone in the office started going beserk - calls where coming in about store servers irreparably crashing all over the country taking all the tills offline and forcing them to close doors midday. It was bad and we couldn't conceive how it could possibly be us or our software to blame.

Turns out we made the local service write any web service errors to a log file upon failure for debugging purposes before retrying - a perfectly sensible thing to do if I hadn't forgotten to check the size of or clear the log file. In about 15 minutes of downtime each stores error log proceeded to grow and consume every available byte of HD space before crashing windows.

#2 - Hardest to find

This was a true "Nessie" bug.. We had a single codebase powering a few hundred sites. Every now and then at some point the web server would spontaneously die and vommit a bunch of sql statements and sensitive data back to the user causing huge concern but I could never remotely replicate the behaviour - until 4 years later it happened to one of our support staff and I could pull out their network & session info.

Turns out years back when the server was first setup each domain was added as an individual "Site" on IIS but shared the same root directory and hence the same session path. It would have remained unnoticed if we had not grown but as our traffic increased ever so often 2 users of different sites would end up sharing a session id causing the server to promptly implode on itself.

#3 - Most elegant fix

Same bastard IIS server as #2. Codebase was the most unsecure unstable travesty I've ever worked with - sql injection vuns in EVERY URL, sql statements stored in COOKIES... this thing was irreparably fucked up but had to stay online until it could be replaced. Basically every other day it got hit by bots ended up sending bluepill spam or mining shitcoin and I would simply delete the instance and recreate it in a semi un-compromised state which was an acceptable solution for the business for uptime... until we we're DDOS'ed for 5 days straight.

My hands were tied and there was no way to mitigate it except for stopping individual sites as they came under attack and starting them after it subsided... (for some reason they seemed to be targeting by domain instead of ip). After 3 days of doing this manually I was given the go ahead to use any resources necessary to make it stop and especially since it was IIS6 I had no fucking clue where to start.

So I stuck to what I knew and deployed a $5 vm running an Nginx reverse proxy with heavy caching and rate limiting linked to a custom fail2ban plugin in in front of the insecure server. The attacks died instantly, the server sped up 10x and was never compromised by bots again (presumably since they got back a linux user agent). To this day I marvel at this miracle $5 fix.

1. Slack. Pretty good chat app for dev companies, I use it to prevent people standing next to my desk 40 times a day.

2. Unit testing tools, especially when fully automated using a git master branch hook, something like codeship/jenkins, and a deployment service.

3. Jetbrains IDEs. I love Vim, but Jetbrains makes theming, autocompleting & code style checks with mixed templating languages a breeze.

4. Urxvt terminal. It's a bit of work at the start, but so extremely fast and customizable.

5. Cinnamon or i3. Not really dev tools, but both make it easy to organize many windows.

6. A smart production bug logger. I tend to use Bugsnag, Rollbar or Sentry.

7. A good coffee machine. Preferably some high pressure espresso maker which costs more than the CEO's car, using organic fairtrade hipster beans with a picture of a laughing south american farmer. And don't you dare fuck it up with sugar.

8. Some high quality bars of chocolate. Not to consume yourself, but to offer to coworkers while they wait for you to fix a broken deploy. The importance of office politics is not to be underestimated.

Finally it was my turn to receive a call from the now infamous Indian "Windows Technical Support Department" from a spoofed out of service 1-888-425-6866 number. My wife and I are on vacation we had just gotten back from the beach and she was taking a shower so I had all the time in the world to play along with them. It is too long to type out but it was extremely entertaining especially the bits that happened after I finally informed them that I own a Mac. The final thing he told me on the phone before hanging up was to go fuck my sister and I felt I must have performed well to deserve that.

Yesterday evening I'd been to Lenovo service center to get a battery for my personal laptop.

Sales guy: Sir, I can see that your laptop had Windows 8 when you purchased it. If you want I can give you a one key recovery disc for that.

Me: Thanks a lot sir, but I run Ubuntu on my laptop. And if you are insisting, I can take that recovery media and install it on my uncle's laptop.

Sales guy: I'll get back to you on this.

*End of conversation* 😂

For fuck sake, stop complaining about the lack of privacy everywhere.
I'm not saying that worrying about your privacy is bad, I also really want to be protected and I know the risks we run when put our information on the net, I care about my data, but please stop acting like whoever uses Google, Facebook or Windows is a fool and you're the only genius around.

Because guess, I use their services and when I use them I'm explicitly authorizing them to process my data, to track me and to create a profile about me. It's an exchange, I know what they're doing and I've control on the data I'm serving them.

If, for some reason, I want to be more protected then I fucking use some open source iper-safe alternative, and that's it.

Seriously, I'm happy if you use those fancy alternative services for everything (for your reasons, I don't care) and I'm glad if you decided to don't use any closed source service anymore, but please, stop screaming against who uses them

Good morning everyone, I hope the Windows update service leaves you alone today.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Won the 2nd prize in a Microsoft hosted hackathon. No for Windows but they really have good cognitive services. Used Azure vision api, one of the good ocr service available.

My Dell Precision M4700 is going to complete 6 years of faultless service, still my main workstation.

It arrived with 3rd gen core i7, 8gb RAM and 750gb 7200rpm hard drive with Windows 7. It gradually transformed into 32gb RAM, 3tb of ssd and Ubuntu 18.04. This dude still runs for days without a problem.

Genuine respect!!

p.s.: If I have to change my next machine, it would be "Dell Precision 7730".

!rant

Today my PCs 9 years of service to me has ended. We lived through 3 windows versions, many many linux distros and even more games. This computer gave me more happiness than any friend or girl. This computer supported me more than any of my parents.
Farewell old friend.

*closes service*
*deletes program / associated exe's*
*attempts to delete a file*
"Failed to delete file: In use by that_program_you_deleted.exe"

WELL IT'S NOT IN USE BECAUSE I JUST DELETED IT SO YOU'D BETTER GET YOUR ACT TOGETHER, WINDOWS

Disclaimer: Long tale of a tech support job. Also the wk29 story is at the bottom.

One time I was working tech support for a website and email hosting firm that was in town. I was hired and worked as the only tech support person there, so all calls came in through me. This also meant that if I was on a call, and another one came through, they would go straight to voice mail. But I couldn't hang up calls either, so, sometimes someone would take up tons of time and I'd have to help them. I was also the "SEO" and "Social Media Marketing" person, as well; managed peoples' social media campaigns. I have tons of stories from this place but a few in particular stick out to me. No particular order to these, I'm just reminiscing as I write this.

I once had to help a man who couldn't find the start button on his computer. When I eventually guided him to allowing me to remote into his computer via Team Viewer, I found he was using Windows XP. I'm not kidding.

I once had to sit on the phone with a man selling Plexus Easy Weight Loss (snake oil, pyramid scheme, but he was a client) and have him yell at me about not getting him more business, simply because we'd built his website. No, I'D not built his website, but his website was fine and it wasn't our job to get him more business. Oh yeah, this is the same guy who said that he didn't want the social media marketing package because he "had people to hide from." Christ.

We had another client who was a conspiracy theorist and wanted the social media marketing package for his blog, all about United States conspiracies. Real nut case. But the best client I've ever had because sometimes he'd come into the office and take up my time talking at me about how Fukushima was the next 911 and that soon it'll spill into the US water supply and everybody was going to die. Hell, better than being on the phone! Doing his social media was great because he wanted me to post clearly fake news stories to his twitter and facebook for him, and I got to look at and manage all the comments calling him out on his bullshit. It was kinda fun. After all, it wasn't _me_ that believed all this. It felt like I was trolling.

[wk29] I was the social media and support techie, not a salesperson. But sometimes I was put in charge _alone_ in front of clients for status meetings about their social media. This one time we had a client who was a custom fashion-type person. I don't really remember. But I was told directly to make them a _new_ facebook page and post to it every day with their hot new deals and stuff. MONTHS pass since I do that and they come in for a face-to-face meeting. Boss is out doing... boss things and that means I have to sit in with her, and for some fucking reason she brought her boyfriend AND HER DAD. Who were both clearly very very angry with me, the company, and probably life. They didn't ever say anything at first, they didn't greet me, they were both just there like British royal guards. It was weird as fuck. I start showing them the page, the progress on their likes goals, etc etc. Marketing shit. They say, "huh, we didn't see any of these posts at home." Turns out they already had a Facebook page, I was working on a completely seperate one, and then the boyfriend finally chimes in with the biggest fucking scowl, "what are you going to do about this?" He was sort of justified, considering this was a payed and semi-expensive service we offered, but holy shit the amount of fire in all three of them. Anyway, it came down to me figuring out how to merge facebook pages, but they eventually left as clients. Is this my fuck up? Is it my company's? Is it theirs? I don't know but that was probably the most awkward meeting ever. Don't know if it comes across through text but the anxiety was pretty real. Fuck.

tl;dr Tech support jobs are a really fun and exciting entry level position I recommend everybody apply for if they're starting out in the tech world! You'll meet tons of cool people and every day is like a new adventure.

It's my second rant about Windows here in two days, but here we go:

Windows used to be a cool OS (and in part it still is). Yes, it's made for the end user, not power users, yes it has many flaws. But it was my gateway to computers and programming. I have fond memories of my first PC, playing around with the old win98 themes (my favorite was the baseball one!).

However, I am very disappointed now. I just had to basically force Windows 10 to stop hogging my bandwidth. It was an actual battle, with the OS simply (I kid you not) running update and other services EVEN AFTER I SPECIFICALLY DISABLED THEM. I just saw the Windows update service running, while its status was disabled. It's absurd.

Sorry Windows, but that's not what I want. I want to choose what happens on my own OS. Linux gives me exactly that, why can't you?

Come back home and turn on my computer and what do i see?

Apparently Windows is now a Service...

I'm still not updating though... wonder if this is FCU...

ŁEŊ@#fmęgwjnfčuÆ®ŊÆŁEŊ3ŋ4ħ€3łæŋ€4æł4ħæ4€ħ9æŋ98ł3ħŋ98↓łħ€9“→↓ŋħł93ŋ@38ŁŊ89ÆŁ4ĦŊ08ÆŁĦ093Đ3@09ŋæłęb„guwahęgawęgÆŁ$ĦÆEı$Ŋ(ÆŁ#Ŋ↑(łæ49↓ŋw

AAAAAAAAAAARRGGHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I'm gonna break this laptop in half if I will not get a break from Windows!

I'm running it in a VM and STILL this fucker gets on my nerves SO FUCKING HARD!!!

1. CPU% 100%. Laptop fans are spinning so hard it's ready to take off
2. My hands are on the laptop. THey are HOT from the heat from inside. Hell that's uncomfortable!
3. ctrl+shift+esc to see why is cpu% 100%. It's something called WMI Host something. Kill that mthrfckr!
4. Process respawns immediately and goes up to 100% again. I have already increased handles limitation for that service a few weeks ago. Like 20x more than it was before!
5. website in IE
6. does not seem to be responding
7. hit f5. Nothing happens
8. Hit refrech buttong on the toolbar. Nothing happens
9. Place cursor at the address bar and hit ENTER. Nothing happens.

Meanwhile my hands are burning.
WHAT THE FUCK!!!

What kind of idiotic system is that!! My asshole is a better OS than this piece of SHIT!

AAAARGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH#@ŦŊæ¶đ@#ĸogęq j

I'm super pissed. Better keep a 30-40 meters distance from me so the things I throw at you would not hit your ballz!

Now that I come to think of it, the only times I am THAT pissed is the times I am using windows. Srsly.

-GDPR
-News letter
-Ads blocker blocker
-Ads popup insite
-Ads popin in video
-Ads popin podcast
-Ads in mail
-Ads in software
-Ads in any android application
-Ads in windows
-Ads in ads
-Auto scrolling
-Slideshow
-Scroll position reset on back button
-Aria-label aria-labelledby aria-role aria-aria of game of thrones
-Order in dom for a11y different of the display order -Button :hover, :focus-visible, :focus-within :fuck-this
- SVG abandoned ware
- I make you a illustrators X version that not work with yours, i use figma. I use affinity, i use akira. I use photoshop, i use word. I use powerpoint, i use publisher, i use paint, i use all Asss (application as a service) on the web and to see what i make you need to pay you an account
-We all make frontend backend... No linter or something... Why we have always 848274 change in git ....
We not host anymore we use 62616 different cloud services to try all the fucking company everywhere
-Make a Drupal CMS to a client that's are to idiots to use it and call you each time they have something to modify

And goes on

Web tooday is fucking crap shit
People realize that you cannot make money anymore with informative website. Then everybody try to squish people at the last drop... Because of selfishness.

A coworker told me this a little while ago and I cringed.

"Coworker installs windows partition o n a Mac, not sure what utility he used but he's handled every IT issue, people in our company for years but googling and researching ways to do things.

Steve comes along to do a service on the Macs (apparently) and sees what my coworker did and says "get rid of that it's a security risk", coworker had a legitimate reason to use Windows, plugin for Excel only works in Windows, so Steve could have totally done checks to ensure security wasn't a risk, but he's a Mac elitist, what can you do :/, lucky coworker though gets to use a windows PC and never looked back xD."

Honestly scared of Steve doing that so called service seeing I have tons of things I need to use (source tree, Android studio, some tools to test push notifications) and just down right deleting them because of his reasons, that and the whole he does services after hours without much warning (last time it was a leave password on desk for the next "week" and Steve will come in and fix the Macs) I can't defend my argument of why I use something like Android studio (to develop the app for the company LOL)

Why is it that a lot of developers don't have the most basic of Windows knowledge? For example, a lot of people complaining about Windows Update. I mean, it's just a setting you can configure and a service you can stop and turn off..

It all sounds ironic.

Spent most of the day researching some obscure exception being raised when trying to use installutil to install my custom windows service only to discover it worked just fine when I ran the command prompt as administrator 🙃🔫

I once had to deal with GoDaddy customer support telling me their servers only support putty for SSH.
Well, fuck you! I use Linux and I SSH with a single command in terminal, no doubt putty is great but get your senses straight that putty is not the only way to SSH when you are being customer support for a tech company, don't just fucking recite a phrase list. Besides, they should understand Windows with putty is not the only way to SSH into servers, juicessh via Android, openssh via Linux, etc...

*btw, before you all rant about me buying from GoDaddy, I was lead dev for a startup few years back and they had already bought it from GoDaddy. Ofcourse they also provide free offers along with an order, which often includes email addresses, annoying support, gut-wrenching quality of service access...

Oh boy, finally something to rant about.

I got hired in a "small" company (not even 2000 people in it), then got "shipped" to a way bigger company. Basically, I work for this company (the french biggest internet / phone service provider) but in the name of my own. And this since last wednesday.

First off, I'm fucking stupid. After leaving the big company that I was in before, I swore to myself that from now on, I would work for smaller companies, mainly because I couldn't stand the inertia that big company have. You ask for something, you get it a month and a half after. The old company has about 6000 employees... This company has 98k people in it. Fuck. My. Life.

Now, to the rant: Orange (the company) decided that they had to move their office somewhere else. They set up a lot of things so that all we needed to do was to put things in boxes, to work somewhere else until next monday, then we could go to the new office on tuesday morning.

Keep in mind that I have been there for 8 days: I keep learning how they do their stuff. For example, if I need a specific docker image, I can't get it from the Docker Hub, the download will fail. However, if I hit an Orange subdomain's registry, I will get this image from a mirror. Because fuck logic.

When we join the company, they give us a Windows laptop ("yeaah we have useless but required Orange softwares that don't run on Linux" "Yeeaaah fuck you") that have a specific VPN allowing us to use the Orange network and, in theory, you can download docker images or clone orange repositories from that network.

In practice, you can simply just go fuck yourself. Why? Because whenever you want to curl, wget or pull anything (or even pip install), your connection keeps being shut down while it waits for the response's header.

The worst part? According to my (new) boss's evasive answers, the way to fix that works with glue, sticks and the power of the Force.

WHY THE FUCK DO YOU ENFORCE US A SHITTY OS FOR DEVELOPMENT, WHEN THE TOOLS YOU SHOVE IN IT WITH A FAKE SMILE DON'T EVEN WORK, AND WE HAVE TO HACK OUR WAY TO FUCKING WORK?

I am at Lenovo service center to bring back my laptop after replace of motherboard (they replaced because card reader not working). Ohh. I checked again and it's not yet working (illiterate technician)...
.
..
Waiting for 1 hour..
..
Meanwhile I see they are outsourcing their screen , monitor,scanner etc. From dell,acer... Ohh how can they prove they are better...
.
.
.
.
Okay!now hit me hard a person came here for service and without even booting they concluded the windows inside laptop is pirated🤔😌

//rant

So I'm a BI consultant, been doing this for about 6 years now, and I'm pretty good at the data stuffs. Now I had to complete a project for a client where we call a web service and it had to be done in .NET. I wrote a console app in C# that called the WS, dumped the data then a stored proc processed the staging tables into final tables that our visualization tool can consume.

It works, it's done.

Mind you I'm not a pure .NET developer.

And now that it's completed and working this fucking .NET dude that works for my client is basically giving me an attitude talking about "why wasn't it done as a Windows service? Blah, blah" Like WTF!!??? I get that he's the C# BSD but like chill bruh!!

It's annoying as fuck having to work on projects that are not your area of EXPERTISE and then be ridiculed by other elitist assholes about it.

Doesn't happen much, but fuck it's something I hate about dev. FYI, if it was the opposite I would just be asking questions for understanding, not being a sarcastic prick.

//rant done

Issue or Error? Rant story time!

I was working on a windows desktop app, and everything was ok, you know, tests completed succesfully, all in time, etc. The problem was when we showed the demo to one of our clients. He saw several screens and we explained all the features to him.

Client: *Sees a Error pop-up indicating that a remote service is temporarly unavailable (what it has to happen in order to show him how the system would warn him when an external service is out of service)
Client: What’s that?
Lead dev: What do you mean?
Client: Yes. That’s an error pop-up
Lead dev: Yes, it’s a message that tells you that there was an issue connecting to the bank service
C: No, no and no. Please change it
L: Why? Don’t you want the system to tell you when there is a connection issue and why is that happening?
C: Yes, but my employees could lost their minds because of this class of messages!
L: So...?
C: You have to change it
L: Ok. What do you want to change?
C: First of all, don’t put an “Error” icon, put an “Warning” icon, and instead of “Error” title, put... “Issue”
L: “Issue?”
C: Yeah. Don’t put the “E” word, if the users see an “Error” message, they could think that the program doesn’t work, even if it does work.

We all though “WTF?!”

To make the story shorter, we changed all the pop-ups. That took two days.

Is that correct? I know that “Error” sounds hard but, seriously? “Issue: The remote service is not available, contact your bank?”

Had given my laptop at the repair store. They were just suppose to do a checkup and then give a choice on whether to repair or not. They repaired it and charged me 2.8K. No unit replacement or anything, just service. I didn't mind it (was actually happy seeing my laptop boot up and not have a blank screen). It's a dual-boot (Windows/Antergos(Arch-linux)). It booted to Windows instead of GRUB. Didn't care too much, because it had happened before and I had handled it.
After I take it back home, I discover that the WiFi doesn't work (it doesn't even seem to be a driver issue). Live boot of arch doesn't have access to WiFi either. Reinstalled GRUB, only to discover it doesn't boot successfully (issues with video card). So, now I'm stuck with fucking Windows WITHOUT WiFi and an arch-linux that doesn't fucking boot.
Gonna reinstall Arch now.

P. S. : Windows is super fast, because I haven't really used it and don't really like using it. I feel very limited by Windows.

Yay, now I know what that windows update was about... oh no, this isn't another "fuck windows, update broke shit again" post.

This is a "wtf, you dodgey shit bags" kind of post, "you" managed to install Skype, install this stupid ducking "meet now" service - which is fucking hidden (anyone have any pointers? Google's not doing its job yet), and now I have to uninstall office completely to remove Skype 🤦‍♂️

Why won't you fuckers let it go, didn't we ALL move to teams recently?

- build a self-service shell script to manage your environment in all kinds of ways with a single script and different switches

- ask tech manager for a server to keep that script [and others] at so coleagues should not bother setting dependencies up on their windows workstations

- be asked to list out all use cases

- be promissed your consolidated tool will be torn apart and replaced by 8 other tools depending on use-cases. Meaning 8 different browser windows open at all times to manage your single env

- be assured that this kind of improvement will take months and is doubtful to pay off

I am currently looking for a DAW (Digital Audio Workstation), because my music projects are starting to get a little too complex for Audacity.

So I started looking for a good, easy-to-learn, ideally free program, and quickly learned that Avid now has a free version of Pro Tools called First.

So I go to their site and fill out the registration form to get the download. In addition to creating an account with Avid, you also need to create one with iLok, which apparently has something to do with how they manage their licenses. Kinda overkill for a free program, but okay...

I download the program (about 3gigs...), install it and try to start it. It gives me an error message about missing some service. Okay? I'm confused because I notice that an 'Application Manager' service has appeared in my tray, and when I open that I can log into my new account just fine. But it still doesn't work.

There's a link in the error message to the iLok website, and it looks like ai need to dowload and install another component. Why didn't that get installed with the program if it's required?

Hmm...

So I go to the iLok site, download it and install it. Pro Tools First still won't start. I realize that the PTF installer asked me to reboot, which I didn't do because: a) I always have a lot of windows open, and b) How often is a reboot ACTUALLY required? Why would you need to reboot?

So I (begrudgingly) reboot, and now the program seems to start initializing... but then it throws an error message about some plugin that it can't load because it doesn't work for the 64 bit version. Then... why are you even looking for it?
And then it says something like: 'I can't handle that, I'm just gonna shut down'.

What?

I try starting it again. Same error appears, but then it gets past it this time... Only to throw another error message about something else it can't load, and therefore it must shut down.

Deep breath.

Third time is the charm, the program actually made it to the project create/load screen! Huzzah!
So I look around a bit, but don't do much. It doesn't seem too intuitive to me, so I start watching some tutorials on YouTube from Avid themselves. It's a little late by now, so I don't get my hands dirty that day.

Next time I want to try out the program I start it up, still get error messages, but it does seem to initialize okay. But then the 'Create project' button doesn't react when I press it.

It turns out that the program takes a looong time to log in to the avid account, even though the manager service is running and logged in...

When it finally logs on I create a new blank project, but it doesn't ask me where to save it to. I see there is a counter saying 1/3 and looking around I find some info about 'cloud based projects'.

It would seem that this program only supports saving projects to the cloud, and you get only 3 projects total. Three. THREE?

Ahem...

I add an instrument track to my new project and select the one and only plugin, which is a synth. I don't see the plugin window, like in the tutorials I watched. I fiddle around with the windows, but I only manage to get the layout fucked up. There's a handy 'Window' menu, but none of the options resets the view. The main window is now sporting a WINDOWS FUCKING 7 BORDER! And partially blocking the view of the top menu.

Blaaargh!

Frustrated, I shut the program down and restart it. I now select one of the project templates (after waiting for it to LOG IN AGAIN!) in the hope that I might have a bit more luck with that starting point.

But when the template has loaded, out of nowhere, the program goes from maximized to windowed mode! And the fucking Win7 border is back again, still messing with the main menu!

FFS!

I get the sucker maximized again and select one of the synth tracks, and Lo and Behold! The synth plugin window actually shows up! But of course there is no sound produced when I play, neither with the keyboard or my midi keyboard.

Oh no, that would have been too easy.

I see some the meters moving when I play, but no sound is produced. I check the options menu, but find out nothing useful except for the fact that the program only support 48kHz sample rate. That's pretty disappointing when you have a 192kHz/24bit soundcard.

I'm done. This piece of shit software is NOT for me. It's bloated, complicated to sign up for and install, extremely limited and buggy as hell!

The final insult is that it takes 5 minutes to uninstall because there is no uninstall option in the so-called 'Application Manager' (of course fucking not!), and doing it through Programs & Features there are 5 (FIVE!!) different apps and services to uninstall, one by one.

0/10, would not recommend.

Anti malware Service Executable

Can the cunt who programmed this please witness the random carnage their piece of shit causes on my work desktop ?

Granted it’s windows but seriously…

Why am I sad, depressed, demotivated, you ask?
Because I was asked to create-react-app with nodemailer, it worked well on heroku, YAYYY MEE, "

"NOTHING GOES WRONG IN DEPLOYMENT FUCK YEAH"

Little did I know that was a "demo" for the business people, My superior / manager/boss wants me to deploy on 1and1 service provider,

> Okay 1 and 1 service provider does provide Nodej, so it shouldn't be hard.
> Turns out it is a Windows hosting server IIS 10 without URL Rewrite.
> *INTERNAL SCREAMING*
I went up to him to talk about this issue and requested to let me talk to 1 and 1, and get this sorted

> But bro, if we cannot fix it, I think they also cannot fix, probably.

*INTERNAL SCREAMING AT PEAK*

I just want URL Rewrite installed on IIS10 so that I can move on to the next project.
A little background for this project
> No support from him during development.

> I personally used HD Images, because why not?

> Website seems slow because of HD Images, and now he complains about it.

You fucking (managers) want a website to be scalable and fast and yet you choose to focus on B U S I N E S S instead of support the real guy.

I'm fucking sick and tired, it took me 24 hours figure out the issue because there is nothing on 1 and 1 support/ forum/help center.

Another 24 hours to try and fix, yet no luck.

I'm gonna finally point the domain name to heroku. Fuck, I'm so fucking done

When I began my sandwich course in a big French company, I was dreaming about cutting edge stack, rocket computer and stuff...

I was disappointed when I came to my office with an old Windows 7 computer, coding via LANDesk to an old server with Windows Server 2008 on it, with Eclipse ... INDIGO...
I have to use Java 1.7 ...
Tomcat 7.
PRTG for monitoring...
Microsoft SQL Server 2008 ...
One screen...
Coding on a codebase where, indubitably, MVC pattern was just a weird thing in books.
No UT.
Lasagna code.

Well it really disappointed me.

Luckily, the Information Service was very open minded and gave me a laptop with Fedora, 3 screens, updated the servers, and let me update the stack, with Java 10, Angular for the front, they are okay for using Docker.

So ... even if it seems to be fucked up, there’s still hope !!

its been there since many years, but:

When did we turned the wrong way and made it acceptable that Windows can blantly say in my face that i cannot deactivate the transmission of data unless i have the "Business" Variant of their Software. Its called Windows 10 PROFESSIONAL. Why are there no international Laws against that? Where was the molotov throwing mob when this became the norm?

Additonally. that cute telemetry service consumes a considerable amount of cpu and disk power from time to time.

and no, Linux is not an alternative. It never was. There is proprietary software and driver sets used for lab equipment and machines that cannot run under linux, noone will ever have the time to tool something for it and the user base is too specific to hope for any community solution.

sidenote: even Level 0 STILL transmits data. I want mode -1

Ok, so I have turned off all shit of Windows Update, and somehow, Windows is updating all apps, and even trying to update itself.

WHY???????????????????

I hate Wednesdays. Networking has the Antimalware service run a full/deep scan every Wednesday and my machine is basically unusable until it finishes.

Devs: "Can we have the scheduled task not run during the day, maybe even on the weekend?"
Gary: "Security is our #1 priority and without proper security methods in place, we'll be open to outside threats. Security begins with you, and ..blah blah blah"

Bite me Gary. I got something for ya.

Get-ScheduledTask | ? TaskName -eq 'Windows Defender Scheduled Scan' | Stop-ScheduledTask

Today,
I tried setting up XAMPP for running my friends code.. it took 5hrs and faced atleast one issue in every step from installation to running.

First
1) XAMPP Did not download itself, found that internet was down.

2) downloaded finally, installation phase went till 98% fatal error, windows collecting info for diagnosis

5)after 3 tries , suddenly it installed successfully

6)Apache force shut, every time I started it

7)1.5 hours later found VM had occupied the port 80, making it shut.
Changed the port

8)PHPmyadmin was recent ,that SQL 5.1 support was not There.

9)Now after setting up new instance of MySql 5.6 , created conflict.
Project referred one instance and PHPmyadmin referred other

10) Changed port numbers and added service entry in windows to make it work

At last the struggle ended up with happy ending.

My installation story precisely

Iam new to PHP development and XAMPP.

Today, in the course of my job, I said...

FFS. I HATE WINDOWS.

It has begun.

Took me five minutes to ssh into the Linux EC2 and get the Jenkins agent installed, configured, and running. Half a fucking hour for Windows Server 2012.

1) Can't ssh to it, so I connect via AWS console... Which means I have to install MS Remote Desktop. WHATEVER. FINE. It's not like ssh is quick and easy or anything.

2) Can't just use the command line, run the .jar &, cntl-z, and bg then log off. Noooo. I have to install the unpacked binaries as a fucking SERVICE. FINE. WHATEVER.

I'm so glad we have a Windows guy that does most of this shit. I can't stand it.

I technically joined just after this guy left(fired) but the stories are to good to tell!

The guy was clearly off but It wasn't his fault he had to of had aspergers

He would demand! To write with two pens in one hand he said it was faster and the only way he could write neatly... (Nope)

I don't think it was to weird but he would put on music and play death metal stuff full volume, because he couldn't hear anyone the team used to make paper planes and fire them at him when they wanted his attention.

Another thing he was into furry ... Stuff but was super open about it had. Wolf's and shit like that on his desk and always had a wolf shirt.

But he was fired, he wasn't great at his job.

I came in to help sort out the mess it was the government's setup for servers and nurses and doctors computers for the NHS over in england.

He effectively skull fucked the entire system.

He magically (I to do day can not understand how) did forced updates and installed to a newer version of Windows servers the problem being the programs wouldn't work on newer windows at the time.

Most were on XP at the time and they used windows servers back then.

Luckily not nation wide just in my local area but still thousands of computers affected.

The issue became this ... You see they had this program on their computers that let them get patient documents and update etc

He removed code or added code that made it update all the laptops and desktops to a new service pack which they didn't want... Then he upgraded the servers to a new windows version I don't remember the specifics

But the updates and new version of Windows made it so the laptops etc couldn't communicate with the servers.

... The next day he got fired and I was brought in for a few weeks to help sort out the mess.

But apparently he was a super interesting guy but with way to many quirks.

It costs the tax payers a fortune! Literally a few million to sort his mistake out people were working round the clock for two weeks straight.

- A girl asks on FB how to deal with a problem in her Windows computer: the system is asking her to introduce the serial key.

- I comment her the possibility of using Linux in case her use cases are simple enough (web, music, videos).

- First reactions are even enthusiastic, some people who had good experiences join the thread to express their delight with Linux.

- Then a guy arrives to tell us how irresponsible we are, telling a poor girl who does not even know how to introduce the serial key... to use Linux (a super complex system!)

- So I tell the guy that Windows is not simple at all, and that most of the times, people just rely o knowing someone else with higher expertise than them, who always end up paying the price of solving the problems caused by Windows, so the users don't really feel how painful is Windows compared to other systems.

- The girl, who was enthusiastic at first, and seems to be not very bright, to say the least, completely misunderstands my answer. She interprets that I'm insulting the poor guys that act as IT service for free, and calls me a "know-all/smartass" (those words are not even close to their Spanish counterpart on pushing down people who know stuff, we are experts on that there, we didn't loose an empire in the 17th century by respecting the wise ones).

This is, in part, why I stopped helping those dumbasses 18 years ago. I forbid myself to learn anything new about Windows (at user level) so I couldn't help these ungrateful and ignorant people who don't make any effort to learn anything by themselves.

Not really a rant and not very random. More like a very short story.

So I didn't write any rant regarding the whole Microsoft GitHub topic. I don't like to judge stuff quickly. I participated in few threads though.

Another thing is I also don't use GitHub very much apart from giving 🌟 to repos as a bookmark. Have one hobby project there. That's all. So I don't worry that much. I'm that selfish and self concerned. :3

I was first introduced to version control system by learning how to use tortoisesvn around 2008. We had a group project and one of the guys was an experienced and amazing programmer unlike the rest of us. He was doing commercial projects while we were at our 1st and 2nd year. Uni had svn repo server. He taught us about tortoisesvn. He also had Basecamp and taught us how to use it as well. So that's how I learned the benefits of using versioning tools and project management tools. On side note, our uni didn't teach any of those in detail :3

After that project, I was hooked to use versioning tools. So until school kicked me out, I was able to use their svn server. When I was on my own, I had to ask Google for help. I found a new world. There are still free svn services that I can use with certain limited functions. That's not the new world; I found people saying how git is better than svn in various ways. It was around 2010,2011.

At first I was a bit reluctant to touch git because of all the commands in terminal approach. But then I found that there is tortoisegit. I still thank tortoisesvn creator for that. I'm a sucker for GUI tools. So then I also have to pick which git servers to use. Hell yeah, self hosted gitlab is the way to go man. Well that's what the internet said. So I listened. I got it up and running after numerous trial and error. I used it briefly. Then I came back to my country on 2012-2013; the land of kilobytes per minute (yes not second, minute).

My country's internet was improved only after 2016. So from 2013 to 2016, I did my best not to rely on internet. I wasn't able to afford a server at my less than 10 people, 12ft*50ft office. So I had to find alternative to gitlab which preferably run on windows. Found bonobo and it was alright. It worked. Well had crazy moments here and there when the PC running Bonobo got virus and stuff. But we managed. We survived. Then finally multi national Telecom corporates came to our country.

We got cheaper and faster mobile data, broadband and fiber plans. Finally I can visit pornhub ... sorry github. Github is good. I like it. But that doesn't mean I should share my ugly mutated projects to the rest of the world. I could keep using Bonobo but it has risks. So I had to think for an alternative. I remembered that gitlab didn't have cloud hosting service when I checked them out in the past. So I just looked into Bitbucket and happy with their free plans of 5 users and unlimited private repos. I am very very cheap and broke.

That's why I said I don't really care that much about the whole M$GitHub topic at the beginning. However due to that topic, I have visited GitLab website again and found out they have cloud hosting now and their free plan is unlimited users and unlimited repos. So hell yeah. Sorry BB. I am gonna move to cheaper and wider land.

TL;DR : I am gonna move to GitLab because of their free plan.

Today it finally happened. I had a „virus“. I wanted to get KMPico for a buddy of mine since he is to lazy to crack it and installs windows after 2 months again.

Today I woke up to an cheap ass miner I caught by accident. All he fucking did was suspend the task when taskmanager is open. It ran as normal user under the process named „kernel.exe“, no cpu priority/affinity, no elevated startup service, all files in one place (under roaming) and worst of all… he kept an remote connection TO HIS FUKKEN PC open, he even is to cheap to get a root server ffs

Am I the only developer in existence who's ever dealt with Git on Windows? What a colossal train wreck.

1. Authentication. Since there is no ssh key/git url support on Windows, you have to retype your git credentials Every Stinking Time you push. I thought Git Credential Manager was supposed to save your credentials? And this was impossible over SSH (see below). The previous developer had used an http git URL with his username and password baked in for authentication. I thought that was a horrific idea so I eventually figured out how to use a Bitbucket App password.

2. Permissions errors
In order to commit and push updates, I have to run Git for Windows as Administrator.

3. No SSH for easy git access
Here's where I confess that this is a Windows Server machine running as some form of production. Please don't slaughter me! I am not the server admin.
So, I convinced the server guy to find and install some sort of ssh service for Windows just for the off times we have to make a hot fix in production. (Don't ask, but more common than it should be.)
Sadly, this ssh access is totally useless as the git colors are all messed up, the line wrap length and window size are just weird (seems about 60 characters wide by 25 lines tall) and worse of all I can't commit/push in git via ssh because Permissions. Extremely aggravating.

4. Git on Windows hangs open and locks the index file
Finally, we manage to have Git for Windows hang quite frequently and lock the git index file, meaning that we can't do anything in git (commit, push, pull) without manually quitting these processes from task manager, then browsing to the directory and deleting the .git/index.lock file.

Putting this all together, here's the process for a pull on this production server:
Launch a VNC session to the server. Close multiple popups from different services. Ask Windows to please not "restart to install updates". Launch git for Windows. Run a git pull. If the commits to be pulled involve deleting files, the pull will fail with a permissions error. Realize you forgot to launch as Administrator. Depending on how many files were deleted in the last update, you may need to quit the application and force close the process rather than answer "n" for every "would you like to try again?" file. Relaunch Git as Administrator. Run Git pull. Finally everything works.

At this point, I'd be grateful for any tips, appreciate any sympathy, and understand any hatred. Windows Server is bad. Git on Windows is bad.

To be able to kill every unnecessary windows "service"

Going back home for the holidays means becoming tech support for pretty much the whole family, unluckly.

As soon as I enter my grandparent's home, my grandpa says "Could you print some emails?". I open his laptop, and I start sweating as soon as I see the Windows XP logo popping up. He (obviously) doesn't remember his password, and the only way to access his (mostly defunct) web mail service is Outlook 2003. For some reason, the web mail provider's POP3 server dies, and i spend half an hour trying to explain it. I ended up leaving with him saying "Why are you even going to a computer engineering university."

Ah, family.

Best shameless hack: installing a Windows Service to restart Apache Tomcat every night at 2am on a clients' server coz the jsp application kept leaking memory and crashing tomcat. So bad, yet such a timesaver.

Not a rant per se,
But is anyone else experiencing weird peripheral device dropouts on windows?

For example, if i turn off my BT headphones and reconnect later, no audio will play through them until I reboot.

Although this doesn't seem to be limited to Bluetooth but USB devices aswell.

I'm thinking some service has shit its self.

You cannot completely delete a windows service, as long as the services panel is open. The service stays undead and prevents any reinstallation until the services panel is closed.

Thanks Microsoft.
Separation of GUI and business logic does not apply here, because it's kernel logic, right?

But at least you're consistents, there is a similar issue with not installing USB drivers if the new hardware dialog is open.

A few days ago I decided to install Windows 7 on a VM (bad idea as it turned out). All fine and dandy and I ran Windows Update a few times to get it at least as up-to-date as it'll get.

I noticed that out of the 4GB RAM I had allocated, an svchost process responsible for the updates was gobbling up all the available memory, just leaving 82MB for everything else. The process itself was as you might imagine consuming over 3GB RAM just for itself. That's how an OS should work right after installation, I'm sure you'll agree.

So I complained about it. Haven't used Windows anywhere for a while so I wasn't used anymore to this level of efficiency. Disk activity went through the roof, though to be fair the underlying disk wasn't an SSD (qcow2 on ZFS on a spinning drive). RAM consumption is something I already covered. CPU temperature shot up to 95C.

So as any idiot would do, I disabled the service related to that process (the svchost process for wuauserv) and the problem went away. But I complained of course, saying that such amazing system utilization metrics wasn't something I expected. I mean for 4GB allocated, having as much as 82MB usable to get stuff done with! 95C on the CPU, on a lot of chips that's the junction temperature! Absolutely beautiful.

When I complained I heard that I had to replace the thermal grease. I do that twice a year. I wrote a custom fan driver for my system that works absolutely great. It was obviously shit. I must be a horrible sysadmin for solving a problem by eliminating the cause, and companies hiring me must be ashamed of themselves. My hardware must be shit (that's a common one with Windows users) despite being a business laptop and the guest system being a VM. Oh and I'm an idiot of course for complaining about such amazing system metrics in Windows.

I love Windows and its community...

Well, being the only one in the house who can really solve computer problems:
We have a home nas in our network for filestorage and since a few weeks, we couldn't acces the device through windows explorer, so today I went on a exploration... First I tried the nas in a seperate different network, and it worked immediatly! oke great, try it in our main network again. And 'ofcours' it's not visible. So I go to the router webpage, and the page of our router just really sucks! So it was quite hard to find out if the NAS was attached or not, ad if so, under which IP. Finally found that, tried to connect to the webpage of the NAS, but got a timeout, ping would timeout too! I thought that that might have someting to do with that the NAS would connect via static IP. So I changed that to a dynamic IP, and I could atleast get to the website. After that I could try all the services and all of them worked perfectly, except for samba... And samba is the only service we actually use, so after that I thought that the device not showing up in network view in explorer had something to do with that the nas wouldn't show me a hostname in the router. So I tried to fix that, after an hour of trying to get the hostname to showup in the router, I just thought that I might try to connect to the nas via the IP. So I found via SO that I could just use //192.168.0.104 and I got into the samba server. So I guess that it was actually working all along 😒. After that I didn't want to bother to work with the hostnames, so I just gave the NAS a fixed IP, made a few shortcuts for my housemates and now it all works again.. For now at least...

For all you complaning about Windows updates.

The last one requires you to accept new Terms of Service.

So just don't accept the : no updates EVER.

bought a cdp ups, because energy service can be shitty in the town I live.

Everything is fine and dandy with the ups, has a nice lcd but it also has a usb cable and dvd with a so called "upsilon 2000" software. One week after buying the ups I decided to venture with the mother fucker software.

Installed the software, looks awful, like a software that made his way from the 90s to this day... it doesn't show the ups... I left it like that... nothing unsual, then my fucking curiosity picked up and I look into the software options and here you go, changed the "communication type" from serial to usb, and ups was recognized, and even nicer, windows started showing a battery icon like if this desktop was a laptop. I was thrilled... until I restarted my pc for whatever reason

gpu decided to break, like if the drivers weren't installed, was laggy, my second screen didn't work, in device manager the video adapter was shown as "generic video adapter". 😡, immediately I blame nvidia cuz I just updated those drivers the day before.

So I started my journey to get the fucking video card working as it should again. installed DDU, reinstalled newest drivers again... didn't work, used ddu again, installed last known drivers again... didn't work, used ddu, installed drivers from windows update... nothing... after some panicking time, I remembered that besides from updating the nvidia drivers I installed that upsilon shit recently... So I decided to uninstall it, and that was the fix, fucking shady software.

It was very naive from me to not blame that upsilon before blaming everything else.

You can connect to Docker containers directly via IP in Linux, but not on Mac/Windows (no implementation for the docker0 bridged network adapter).

You can map ports locally, but if you have the same service running, it needs different ports. Furthermore if you run your tests in a container on Jenkins, and you let it launch other containers, it has to connect via IP address because it can't get access to exposed host ports. Also you can't run concurrent tests if you expose host ports.

My boss wanted me to change the tests so it maps the host port and changes from connecting to the IP to localhost if a certain environment variable was present. That's a horrible idea. Tests should be tests and not run differently on different environments. There's no point in having tests otherwise!

Finally found a solution where someone made a container that routed traffic to docker containers via a set of tun adapters and openvpn. It's kinda sad Docker hasn't implemented this natively for Mac/Windows yet.

Do you guys have any issue with Firefox lately?

It's lagging and hanging a lot on my laptop since like two weeks ago.

I usually run like 2 windows with no more than 7 tabs each. So 15 tabs max in total.

The rest of service I run are sublime, terminal, Mailspring on my lubuntu LAMP stack. :(

The latest app I installed and used is Mailspring, so if nobody has similar issue, I'm gonna disable it and test.

So I suck at scripts, windows scripts namely. I need a script to monitor a program on machine and send an email if it goes down. There are eight instances running on the machine and they can be determined to be working if a specific port is open, one port per instance. I have no clue where to start and I thought it could be done with some existing service or script. Suggestions?

There it fucking is again...

The legendary spyware "Antimalware Service Executable".

I changed the entry in the regedit. Tried to delete it with every possible tool. Tried to "chmod" it in the Windows way to be able to delete it as an admin. Doesn't work.

I swear in the name of bloody satan. This shit is doomed. It cannot be removed even if your shit begins to burn.

Microsoft, fucking remove it.
It is not a fucking feature!

Your windows updates fucking suck, your compatibility telemetry whatever the fuck you call these retarded ass "features" anymore fucking suck, your windows defender sucks.

Is there anything that doesn't suck in the features that you produce? I don't fucking think so. Fucking die for fucks sake.

Apple is overpriced, but at least they do their job well. Not like you, you fucking scumbags!

JESUS!

Windows piece of shit mother fucker useless trash.

Why can't I just compile without the dumb ass "Antimalware Service Executable" having to check every single fucking file and eating fucking 4GB ram. God damn it. fiadsfleaf oaiehjf afpo jafj
I start compiling binutils and then the whole thing fucking crashes ad;adsfjhc odshfaj;sdl hfja;odsfh;osa dhif;aosdhfi a;osdihf;skdjnvba; dsjch;soduf;dsao fu;nodjf ;anaod

Since I can't make many posts, I'll try squeeze them all in one:

1. Phone recruitment interview went "well", I even spoke french at some point! 😃
I have to brush up my knowledge again for the technical test (I hate them). Somehow I got excited, which I shouldn't, but only time will tell...

2. My brain is stuck with opening a Twitter account, mainly for following people/companies news. I don't know if it's worth it, so I would your feedback on this.

3. I've finally come down to listening to synthwave while coding and I was wondering if there's any good free service (I'm still poor, so I don't want neither Deezer nor Spotify), preferably with a UWP app on Windows 10 (that is not Soundcloud).

Oh, my worst dev experience.

First of all everyone know it, people who ask you to repair there computer 🤦‍♂️
Or people who say: "Hey Windows Media player is not working now. Fix it"

But the best moment and worst too is a moment where I present my new website and a friend start to refresh the site with F5 on his browser. I ask him why he do it and he answere "Yeah, you will be rich when I do it"

I don't get it. Why rich? So I ask him and he answere that websites are paid by web request an "clicks" "views" counter.

That was the stupidest thing I ever hear. Okay when I would show ads than maybe it's "true" but without them🤦‍♂️

But that's not the end after I explained him that it's not so he fucked me up that I would be very stupid because I don't register on a service which pay you for it. I explained him that the only service could be an ad service but no he don't understand it and try to discuss with me that a service like this exist. I ask for a link to the service and he could not answer.

For me it was the worst experience because for me it was the most stupidest thing ever and he try to discuss with me and really we discuss 1 hour about it🤦‍♂️🤦‍♂️🤦‍♂️

My windows defender has gone out of the window.
Now whenever i open windows security app, it shows a blank page.
There's is no tray process running and I can't find any service too.
I know it's a huge virus attack.
Can anyone suggest some methods to know what is causing this problem?

This has happened once before. That time i used DISM and checked windows files integrity. It replaced corrupted ones and then windows worked fine.

This time i want to know the cause.
I wanna root it out and rip it apart.

Ok so riddle me this. The service for an application were required to run to send clients insurance through (as per government regulations) was working fine all day working super fast. Rare but awesome. I get a call one hour prior to the office closing (I don't work weekdays) and I am told that all of a sudden insurance isn't sending.

My mind goes right to this fu**ing process. Sure enough it's stopped on the server. Well shit ok. I click start..... Nothing. I kill it from task manager.... Nothing. "SERVICE CAN'T START"

I'm like ok that's fine let's check event logs.... Nothing. No problem let's just run it not in a service container and see if there's an error. NOPE IT DOESNT LET ME.

Okok so that's cool let's just try reinstalling the app. NOPE CAN'T DO THAT WITHOUT RESTARTING THE WHOLE FUCKING SERVER WHICH BRINGS THE ENTIRE OFFICES MANAGEMENT SYSTEM OFFLINE BECAUSE THIS FUCKING APP NEEDS TO BE ON THE SAME GODDAMN SERVER.

So i was working on an android app that communicate with restfull web service. I setup everything , started the web service api at localhost and launched the app on genymotion (virtual machine android) .Nothing seems to work . I checked the code , debugged some stuff and it turns out i couldn't communicate with the api server. I tested the api on my browser and nothing is wrong ,I tried to test on the phone vm browser and voila 404 not found . How the hell it's working on my windows and not on the vm (with localhost url :/ ) .I kept debugging for more then 3 hours with no solution to be found .
The moment I realised wtf I'm doing and how stupid I was => shut down my laptop went to coffee shop and bought a lifeless dark espresso .

In case you didn't understand what the issue is, I was running the api on my windows localhost and testing it with same url on my android vm (I should've changed localhost with my machine IP )

Rant time. Oh boi.

So, a bit of context: I am a university student in Greece and I have a desktop PC with elementary OS on it. When the unis closed down because of Coronavirus, I moved back to my parents', without my PC, only a usb stick with elementary OS installed on it. That was before the lockdown. My parents have a desktop PC and my old laptop, both with Windows rn. I'm only able to work using Linux, so I've been just popping that elementary OS USB stick whenever I needed to work.

All cool and good. Until the usb got full. It was a 16GB one after all. No biggie, I bought a new 64GB one from a well known Greek tech shop along with a webcam my mother needed. It was a LEXAR one.

They fucking took a week to transfer it. As if the closest shop to me was in fucking Germany. For context, the drawing tablet I bought from China the other day only did 2 weeks to come. During this time I could barely use Linux because my USB stick had only some 600MB free.

Ok, wtv I said to myself. I am a patient person after all. I received the USB stick, along with the webcam, in good condition, in their packaging. Alright. I dd'ed everything from the 16GB stick to the 64GB one and then I extend the partition. Everything works flawlessly. And it's faster too.

Next day, I boot up from it again. It boots up good. Nice, time to do some work. I open my editor. And it fucking freezes. The editor is not some VSCode or Atom or any of that heavy shit, it's just elementary OS Code. A very lightweight Gtk3 app. Strangely though, the rest of my OS (the dock autohide, eg.) Seems totally responsive. I try to open another app. No luck. Not even switching TTYs work. Good shit. I force shutdown my PC. I try to boot again from that piece of shit. And guess what! NO BOOT BITCH. Like, fuck you. I boot from my previous 16GB one. Linux won't recognize it. No /dev/sdc like I used to have. Ok, lsusb. Nope, nothing. I disconnect it and reconnect it, and lsusb. An empty entry appears.I run it a couple of times, and the it disappears again. I switch to TTY 2. I get read errors and usb error -71.

And I want to fucking explode

I call back to support for the warranty coverage. I wait for a good 10 minutes and a nice lady picks up. I tell her the issue. She says that the support team will call me for the issue this day it the next day.

I hang up.

It feels like some fucking prank. YOU MOTHERFUCKING TOOK SO LONG TO DELIVER MY SHIT. Not to mention that the shitty courier service they are working with wouldn't deliver the goods to my home because it's slightly out of town. AND NOW YOU ARE DELAYING MY WARRANTY RETURN? HOW THE FLYING FUCK DID YOU BECOME A WELL KNOWN TECH SHOP WITH SUCH SHITTY SERVICE?

IF YOUR BRAINS WERE DYNAMITE YOU WOULDN'T HAVE ENOUGH TO BLOW YOUR NOSES.

YOUR THE SERVICE EQUIVALENT OF A PARTICIPATION AWARD.

Foreigners' view of Greeks suddenly doesn't seem so unreasonable. Yes, we are fucking lazy asses. And we also hate that. We hate each other for that very reason. May this country not live any longer.

I started working my new job as a programmer(c#, java, etc.) in a very good programming company.

My first task was to optimise their DB. The DB has indexes and around 3mil rows. The db is slowwww as fuck.

So i made a windows service that reorganises indexes (Depending on blank pages and fragmentation of the index) in DB each week on time.

But as soon as new rows start to come in, the fragmentation of the indexes just sky rocket.

I tried with changing idexes so there will accually be onli indexes we need.

Can anyone help me how can i fix fragmentation problem so the select querries will be much faster.

Sorry if I don't know the solution, I'm new at this task.

Thank you!

Ugh am so done with linux.

I dualbooted ubuntu 16.4 LTS alongside win10 on my new laptop 3 years ago. Back then , the whole os and kernel stuff were new for me, but once i understood how things work in it, i always found linux to be a superior alternative for doing any development related task than windows.
The way terminal gives us sheer raw power to handle services and applications ourselves makes everything easy in linux.

Wanna run a lamp server? Install all parts by yourselves. Problems with the lamp server? You are just 1 command away to know which service/package is causing issue. Some python module fucked up? You can go on checking every package present anywhere on your disk. No permissions? Sudo.

But recently i got so much fed up of its gui. I have gone from 16.4 to 18.4 to 20.4 , but no version seems to handle multiple gui s/w running parallely .
I usually have the requirement to open 2-3 windows of chrome with 30-40 tabs, 1-2 projects of Android studio and studio emulator. But this shit blows even with just 1 project open on studio and nothing else! The even the keyboard and mouse gets stuck when i studio is making a built.
And don't get me started on how slow my system becomes when switching b/w AS and chrome :''( . Maybe there's issue with the dual boot or because i gave very large swap/root partitions when i first dualbooted or something else , but i am in so much pain :/

Finally i went back to win10 a month ago and was a little surprised to find that it sucks a little less now. Aside from the ugly forceful updates, it has been a breeze for working . The builds take longer time (fuck windows defender), but My Android studio (and everything else) does not lag when switching between multiple processes. I even once ran an emulator instance and it was still working fine . The process management of windows is very good.

I have heard that mac is kind of in middle of the 2 and better than both providing rich process management and powerful terminal commands . Waiting for the day when i have enough money(or no longer require my kidney) to buy and maintain a MacBook :/

!rant

So I have bought a new laptop and this time instead of straight up booting linux I had an idea of giving micro$oft a try, so I have decided to use only their services for 2 weeks.

To be honest, I really did not expect windows to use do much cpu and hdd during updates and background tasks, but after a day it was ok and windows feels snappier than during my last encounrer (maybe cause the new hw?).

I was even so dedicated that I started to use cortana and I have to tell, that she is dumb as fuck, since she fails to understand even the basic tasks and if u want something advanced, she refers to the next update. But boy, tell her to open Visual Studio and she asks if you want VS Code or Visual Studio, which seems great. But my response was 'Code' then she insisted that I said Coke. Im like OK, Im not native english speaker, lets try Visual Studio Code, where she told me that there is no such thing and Spelling VS - Code ended me in bing search for Unesco :/

I really want to like Cortana, she has nice name, nice history, but she is like that A girl from class, who looks gorgeous, has great voice, but then u reallise that she just eats a book before exam and after that she is that dumb basic hoe.

I also gave a shot to Bing and Edge. Bing is something between Google and DuckDuckGo, since it gives you a liiitle less results from search history, yet if you want to find something in different language its even possible to tell you that what are you trying to find does not exist.

But I have to tell, that I like Edge and I mean it. Like... Its fast and has some good features, like pushing all your open tavs away, so you can open them Later. It also does not have that stupid ass feature that lets you control tab from left to right, not by chronological order, so you wont end up in infinity loop of 2 tabs. And even if people make fun of M$ trying to convince you to use Edge by being too aggresive. God go on edge and try to use some Google Service(You still dont use chrome?!).

I also tried to play with .Net core and I have to tell that against java they are a bit further. I liked some small features, but what I just simply loved was rhe fucking documentation. You basically dont need google, sincw they give you examples and explain in a human way.

What I didnt quite get was the 'big' Visual Studio. Tje dark theme to me feels strange(personal and irrelevant). Why the hell I do need to press 2 shortcuts to duplicate line?! Why is it so hard to find a plugin to give me back my coloured brackets and why the fuck it takes like a second to Cut one line of code on a damn i7?!

Visual studio Code was something different. It shows how dark theme should be done, the plugin market is full of stuff and the damn shortcuts are not made for octopi. So I have to recommend it ^^.

I even gave a shot to word and office as a whole and fuck I never knew that there are so many templates. It really made my life easier, since all you need to do is find the right one in the app, instead of browsing templates online, where half of them are for another version of your text editor.

Android Launcher was fast, had a clever widget of notes and the sync was pretty handy to be honest so I liked that one as well.

What made me furious was using the CLI. Godfucking damn what the fuck is ipconfig?! :/

Last thing what made me superbhappy was using stuff without wine and all of the addional shit. Especially using stuff like Afinity Designer and having good looking apps in general. I mean Open source has great tools l sometimes with better functionality. But I found out, that what is pleasure to look at, is pleasure to work with.

To Summarize a bit.

It wasnt that bad as I expected. I see where they are heading with building yet another ecosystem of It just works and that they are aiming at professionals once again.

So I would rate it 6/10, would be 7 if that shit was Posix compatible.

I know that for Balmer is a special place in hell... But with that new CEO, Microsoft at the end may make it to purgatory..

I hate the current state of internet based service providers. They are collecting so much data, it's scary and borderline stalking.

A simple search on Netflix changes ads shown by Google. I watch a lot of Japanese/Korean drama and now my ads are in Japanese. What the actual fuck.

I run windows 10 on my main rig because of steam and windows only games. One day I was searching for filezilla in windows search. Since it is now handled by the same UI as cortana, it searched it on the web too. So now I have ads related to ftp hosting in Japanese.

Sometimes I feel like just formatting my system and install debian on it. But those games man. May be I can live without them.

Can we bring back the internet from 2008. It was so much better back then.

I created an ASP.Net Web Application as my personal Web site. Tested it locally then wanted to test it in a live environment. I purchased a domain/hosting package then publish via FTP. Point it to homepage and nothing shows up. I call customer service and they say it's hosted on a Linux server but their options don't show that it is Linux based. So I had to change it to a Windows platform that it should have already been on. SMH 😣

Why the fuck does a windows server 2016 guest with ballooning service on proxmox take the full 10GB RAM from the host I assign to it?

I have installed all the virtio drivers and it does show in the guest summary itself the real usage of 1GB RAM, but if I check in htop or the datacenter summary, it shows the usage is 10/11GB all the time.

No I don't want your updates every single day, Windows 10. Maybe I don't want to be so edgy with your updates. May be I like it XP style when updates didn't used to bug me with every single boot up and power down. It has become even worse. Who thought defering updates to the next boot up was a good option? It fucking interferes with the flow of work. They were like -
"You know what, let's update till 35% and then fucking update the remaining 65% at next boot"
"But users will be frustated"
"We'll show the update screen with clean font and a nice background. It will calm them down"
"Okay, so let users choose when to download the updates"
"That's not a fucking option, mate"
And if you are going to force updates down our throats please fucking mention what is being changed as a short description instead of showing a 'KBxxxxxxx' update number! If not that, at least hyperlink the thing to your update docs page! OR Mention a version buff if not it! I HATE seeing 'Update for Windows 10 Version xxxx for x64-based Systems' EVERY. SINGLE. TIME I see an update ready to be downloaded.
And no I don't play Candy Crush, or other games that are pre-installed as soon as I re-install fresh Windows or go on Xbox App. I hate to do this ritual of turning off auto download from Windows Store every time. So please don't pre-configure anything for me. Keep it fucking raw. That's why Linux distros win.
I'm just saying, Service Packs were a great thing with a need of little improvements. You guys ruined the whole experience, Microsoft.

Fuck Antimalware Service Executable.
All my homies hate Antimalware Service Executable.

I hope I can hop into Linux before this happens to my personal computer.

I have just slept for a minimum of 5 hours. It is 7:47 PM atm.
Why?
We have had a damn stressful day today.
We have had a programming test, but it really was rather an exam.
Normally, you get 30 minutes for a test and 45 minutes for an exam.

In this "test" we have had to explain what 'extends' does and name a few advantages of why one should use it.
Check.
Read 3 separate texts and write the program code on paper. It was about 1 super class and 1 sub class with a test class in Java.
Check.
Task 3: Create the UML diagram of the code from above. *internally: From above? He probably means my code since there is no other code there. *Checks time*. I have about 3 minutes left. Fuck my life.*
Draws the boxes. Put the class names in each of them. A private attribute for the super class.
Teacher: Last minute!
Draw the arrow starting starting from the sub class to the super class.
Put my name on each written paper. And mentally done for the day. Couldn't finish the last task. Task 3.
During this "test", I heard the frustrations of my classmates. Seemed like everyone was pretty much pissed.
After a short discussion with the teacher who also happens to be the physics professor of a university nearby.
[If you are reading this, I hope that something bad happens to you]
The next course was about computer systems. Remember my recent rant about DNS, dhcp, ftp, web server and samba on ubuntu?
We have had the task to do the screenshots of the consoles where you proof that you have dhcp activated on win7 machine etc. Seemed ok to me. I would have been done in 10 minutes, if I would be doing this relaxed. Now the teacher tells us to change the domain names to <surnameOfEachStudent>.edu.
I was like: That's fine.
Create a new user for the samba server. Read and write directories. Change the config.
Me: That should be easy.
Create new DNS entries in the configs.
Change the IPv6 address area to 192.168.x.100-200/24 only for the dhcp server.
Change the web server's default page. Write your own text into it.
You will have 1 hour and 30 minutes of time for it.
Dumbo -ANGRY-CLIENT-: Aye. Let us first start screenshotting the default page. Oh, it says that we should access it with the domain name. I don't have that much time. Let us be creative and fake it, legally.
Changes the title element so that it looks like it has been accessed via domain name. Deletes the url and writes the domain name without pressing Enter. Screenshot. Done. Ok, let us move to the next target.
Dhcp: Change lease time. Change IP address area. Subnet mask. Router. DNS. Broadcast. Optional domain name. Save.
Switches to win7.
ipconfig /release
ipconfig /renew
Holy shit it does not work!
After changing the configs on ubuntu for a legit 30 minutes: Maybe I should change the ip of the ubuntu virtual machine itself. *me asking my old self: why did not you do that in the first place, ass hole?!*
Same previous commands on win7 console. Does not work. Hmmm...
Where could be the problem?
Check the IP of the ubuntu server once again. Fml. Ubuntu did not save when I clicked on the save button the first time I have changed it. Click on save button 10 times to make sure it really is saved now lol.
Same old procedure on win7.
Alright. Dhcp works. Screenshot.
Checks time. 40 minutes left.
DNS:It is your turn. Checks bind9 configs. sudo nano db.reverse.edu.
sudo nano db.<mysurname>.edu.
Alright. All set. It should work now.
Ping win7 from ubuntu and vice versa. Works. Ping domain name on windows 7 vm. Does not work.
Oh, I forgot to restart the bind9 server on ubuntu.
sudo service bind stop
" " " start
Check DNS server IP on win7. It looks fine.
It still doesn't work. Fuck it. I have only 20 minutes left. Samba. Let us do this!
10 minutes in. No result. I don't remember why. I already forgot why I have done for it. It was a very stressful day.
Let us try DNS again.
Oh shit. I forgot the resolver!
sudo nano /etc/resolv.conf
The previous edits are gone. Dumb me. It says it in the comments. Why did not I care about it. Fuck it.6 minutes left. Open a yt video real quick. Changes the config file. Saves it. Restarts DNS and dhcp. Closes the terminal and opens a new one. The changes do not affect them until you reopen them. That's why.
Change to win7.
Ping works. How about nsloopup.
Does not work.
Teacher: 2 minutes left!
Fuck it.
Saves the word document with the images in it. Export as pdf. Tries to access the directories of the school samba server. Does not work. It was not my fault tho. Our school server is in general very slow. It feels like they are not maintained and left alone like this in the dust from the 90s.
Friend gets the permission to put his document on a USB and give the USB to the teacher.
Sneaky me: Hey xyz, can you give me your USB real quick?
Him: sure.
Gets bombed with "do you want to format the USB?" pop-ups 10 times. Fml. Skips in a fast way.
Transfers the pdf. Plug it out. Give it back.
After this we have had to give a presentation in politics. I am done.

So, this morning was crazy.

I had the Service Desk, first ticket of the day: A notification for Updates in Windows 10 from a concerned co-worker who hasn't seen this.

We distribute our updates with a WSUS and install them automatically and haven't approved any of the creators and fall creators updates.

After checking I saws that the client had the Creators Update already installed!

This means, this Client ignored our WSUS Updates and installed direct from Microsoft!

MICROSOFT YOU MAKE ME MAD!!!

Status: Got off hour+ long call with provider teir2 tech support because their "sync service" isn't syncing. "It's all cloud controlled" they tell me. Whatever.

It does have the ability to install a Windows service to do the needful! 🎉

However the program that does the actual syncing is the "launcher" application, and the service's only job is to tell the launcher to run. 🤦‍♂️

Their assumption is that there will be a user that gets smacked in the face with a UAC prompt when they first log in and just shrug it away. Which is the Launcher application.

The sync service is not capable of running the sync application without a desktop session I guess?

MOTHERTRUCKERS do you understand what the point of a Windows Service is?!?

I tried relating this situation to how Windows Update works: It will update whenever the fuck it wants without the user doing anything because of the Service, and you only configure the service with the Control Panel/Settings App. You don't need the Control Panel/Settings App running in order for Windows Update to work, but it's there for status info and configuration.

Anyways, this software does not do that. It apparently *requires* both the service AND the launcher program running in order to work. Not work properly, to work *at all*.

Anyways, It's installed on a computer that's not normally logged into, but is always on (where other "always needs to be running" programs live). Normally the hackaround would be to launch the program via Scheduled Task.

This program apparently does not want to run as a scheduled task, or the Task Scheduler is being stupid and can't figure out "Hey, it's time to run this program. Do it!". Naturally it runs if told manually.

The fact that I'm even doing this at all is stupid, but even more infuriating is that it's just not working unattended. You know, what the service should be doing. But no, the service runs happily all alone, doing nothing of note, while Task Scheduler sucks its stick running OneDrive installer but not the launcher program.

Pluckin' donuts...

Customer: "no obligation quote: upgrading 20 pc from ME to XP."
Sales dept.: "what? Lol?" *incredibly expensive ME to Windows 10 upgrade service quote*
Customer: *accepted*

I have found a DVD with a Windows XP backup file with my late mother's photos on it. However, nothing seems to open the file. I, of course, did a lot of Google searches on how to do this and what it seems to come down to is a need to run the restore on an XP, Windows 7, or Server 2008 machine. There are several legacy ntbackup restore programs out there, and Microsoft seems to still have a page for downloading that, but it relies on the long-deprecated Removable Storage Service that no longer exists on Windows 10. So, a) Microsoft are a bunch of jerks for not supporting restores of legacy backups and b) does anyone have a successful method you've used to get a BKF file to restore? All the things I've tried say the BKF file is corrupted, but how to know for sure when Removable Storage Service isn't present?

When I hear the word "service" I think of something that just runs in background and you can do stuff with it. I have no idea how to create one, I almost had to make one on Android and use it properly, now I'm back to Windows and Java and we have something working as a service, I have no idea how it was created and how it does work, I just know how to start, restart and stop it. If you asked me how it works and how to communicate with it - XD no idea lol but let me google that. I have almost 4 years of professional software development experience.

And at this point I'm too afraid to ask ;____;

That moment when you have to file your hours worked, but the service we use to do so *exclusively* runs on *Internet Explorer* so you have to shut down your Linux distro with all the stuff you have running, boot up your Windows pro partition and log into your service, just to punch in a couple numbers.

Seriously. A website that runs *exclusively* on IE?? What the fuck.

Friendly reminder to trim your services list with msconfig if using Windows. Services that are STOPPED are not DISABLED, and they can be brought back up when just stopped, sometimes remotely.

(This reduces chances of being bitten by malware that uses the Fax service or similar, as there are a few that have in past used often-unused services to propagate. It also reclaims a small bit of memory, and the more real memory you have, the less you page out when compiling or similar, which is slow as fuck.)

also for the love of god stop using RDP and use something that's more penetration-proof than a paper plate...

After doubting Deepin OS for 4 days and slangs to Windows, it turns out, ISP is blocking the port 22, which is why I was not able to communicate to my instance through SSH.

One of the major Cellular company and Fastest 4G in the whole country, 'Idea', is blocking the vital port 22. The same company promoted it's Internet service through chain of adv. calling it's Cellular Internet network, "Idea Internet Network (IIN)". Only to make it sound like IIT, IIMs ( elite indian colleges). Check on YouTube, IIN, if available

This happened last November. I was on my merry way, not using Windows on my laptop. When suddenly a friend asks me to do some heavy video editing work.
And none of the softwares on Linux are as good as Premiere Pro, After Effects etc
Davinci Resolve on Linux has codec issues and is a pain to deal with

Anyway, I boot up windows and somehow it updates itself (I distinctly remember disabling the update service permanently).
So now, it bugs me every fucking minute to reboot.
Luckily I decide to finish my project before rebooting.
Coz as soon as I reboot, it throws me an error saying something like my license key couldn't be verified. One key recovery doesn't help
I have a OEM licensed Windows 10 Home that came with the laptop.

The solutions are to either recover windows, which needs a fucking 11GB download or reinstall Windows (but hey... Lenovo didn't give me a Windows License key. And I have a lot of pre setup folders on the windows drive linked to my Linux, making it a bad choice to wipe that drive). To put the cherry on the top, I have to download a software that Lenovo provides (Windows only) to download that 11GB iso.
Every sane person around me uses Linux (I only used Windows for Video Editing)
Also, living in India, 11GB is a fucking big size to download.... And the software doesn't support interrupted downloads
One more pain in the ass....
So, fuck you Windows. Fuck you Lenovo.

Living happily with elementary OS since then
Never bothered to download the Windows iso

When people tell me they're computer illiterate, they either know their exact Windows version to the Service Pack and can utilize the task manager effectively or they don't know that their computer desktop is different from their browser homepage. There is no in-between.

So, I'm starting cross platform mobile app development with NativeScript. Just side projects at the moment, nothing "business-related".

Well, as for the Android part, I'm free to choose whether I'd like to develop on Windows 10- or on my Linux machine. I can compile the project on either system. As for publishing it to Google Play, I might do it, I might not do it, since it is possible to install an app by providing the apk file.

As for the Apple part: I'd either have to buy an completely overpriced Apple computer (iMac, MacBook, etc.) or subscribe to a pricey online CI/CD service... just to be able to compile the fucking project. And if that wouldn't be enough, Apple wants to charge me 99 $ a year so I may have a chance to publish the app to their App Store... of course without any guarantees that my app will be published, because it might be revoked by them. WHAT THE FUCK?

Why the fuck is everyone behind this whole privacy thing . I mean what did you expect , servers do cost... you know . No one wants to provide you a service to chat with your shit collecting butler in the adjacent room unless it's going to benefit them .

Stick your face on the internet and want people to date you ?

Understand that your virtual social needs need to be supported by a ridiculous amount of electricity and man power which wouldn't be required if you could just throw out your rotting willie nilles in the open .

All this isn't fucking free .. wait were you shocked ? Oh so you just thought there were a few thousand servers powering buckets of pictures of horse poop that you for some reason thought your girlfriend was interested in . NO!

IT'S PRIVACY you are paying with your gaddamn privacy !! Information pays just like the time you paid a 100 bucks to the boyfriend of your girlfriend to find out more details .

Ridiculous . You people don't like ads . You don't like paying . You don't like providing information . THEN DON'T USE THE DAMN INTERNET .

IF YOU'RE REALLY THAT CONCERNED ABOUT YOUR PRIVACY THEN SPEND SOME VALUABLE TIME TO ACQUIRE ENOUGH OF A SKILLSET TO SETUP A VPN AND STOP POSTING YOUR PHONE NUMBER ON YOUR EX'S WALL ASKING HER TO CALL YOU.

One more honest thing to rant about is ads . As much as you hate them they're an easy way out . I'm not sure why a 20 second ad would bother you on mobile and not on television and I'm not sure why you wouldn't buy the ad company and shut it down if 20 seconds were so costly to you .

I want to rant even more on uninstalling services like Windows and Google for stupid reasons but I'll take a break here . My frustration has touched low levels.

Windows update service on servers...that trigger a 15 minute countdown to reboot when you log in. Even under business hours.

Just received an email from a high maintenance client - this is verbatim what I've just read:

"If I could pull out my Windows vista and then plug in a newer windows system without any stress I'd go for this. Do you do this service? I could pay you for an hour to come my business, Unplug, Plug in and sort this out etc etc. It sounds like a quick job to me."

Note I'm a software developer, nothing to do with day to day IT support stuff. The client's business property is a 45 min drive from my own.

So basically, according to my client I can charge a single hour (£85.00 +vat) for a 90 minutes round trip, to migrate their PC to a newer operating system and move all their data and apps over and then setup the new OS. All for £85.00 +vat. All excluding the fact I

What the literal heck. I'm face palming all over the place.

Stupid Windows Update back at it again with the Fall Creator's Update. More like Fail Creator's Update. My poor laptop took it too hard and the built-in mobile hotspot feature is currently bugged and not working, with the ICS service in task manager stuck at 100% you usage. Restore to previous version or not to restore to previous version? That my friends is the question. *picks up Ubuntu 17.10 live disk*

Another 'fun' rant

Wrote a new server application and got the request from customer services to make it compatible with a slightly older DB version.

Today, CS asked me to install everything on the customer's test environment so I made a build and installed it there.

Wanted to run the service, no .Net framework 4.7.1 installed. Fine, download the installer ...

Start installing .Net framework 'unsupported OS'. Started looking into it. Customer is still running an old unsupported Windows Server 2008 ...

Asked some colleagues whether this was normal. Apparently, yes.

Seems CS isn't capable of telling customers to at least have a supported windows version when they want our software. As if security issues due to people here not understanding TCP/IP isn't enough, we now have security issues due to old, unsupported Windows versions.

Note to self: never trust anyone who says that 'security is the most important thing in our software enviornment'.

Not the worst but kinda recent,
Me and my partner wrote a cool distributed service and tested it carefully on both windows and linux.
The course staff failed to run it, and guess what, it's our responsibility that their configuration is fucked up and we lost precious points in our grade due to that. All with a full backup of the responsible professor.
Luckily it's my last ever course and I don't give a sh*t.

Ask someone for their Java windows service and installation instructions for testing our integration. They reply with info on how to install Java.

!rant #tip

Windows 10 - service host high cpu usage

Stop the superfetch service and it would be down to normal.

You should checkout the description of the superfetch service... Lol ):D

Spent more time than I am willing to admit debugging a Windows service, had a space between the ; and the next path on the %PATH% environmental variable. Powershell called the executable with no problem.

Two working days lost because of windows update: pc takes a lot of time to shut down .. lot of time to open .. when it opens it is very laggy because the windows update service is consuming my disk usage .. what is the hell is microsoft doing?
Is anyone else facing the same problem? Serious question here

I would like to config a service on Windows to make it rerun a .exe and I ended deleting and adding keys to the Windows registry...

Now everything is broken ans I'm here looking at my computer burning down.

If anyone ever wanted to create a session with a unique application available on it (since this session would be used in a public area) please let me know you've been at this point too, when you wanted to break a wall !

All people are happy except me as Reliance (Service Provider) giving Unlimited 4G Unlimited Calls and many service Unlimited till December and I cannot use that SIM because I have Windows Phone :(

WTF Windows?

If you call the API function to lookup the name of a service it expects a buffer and the size of the buffer.
If the supplied size is smaller than the service name it returns the number of characters (excluding the null-terminator) of the service name.
You can allocate a buffer for the service name and call the function again to receive the service name.

Except now Windows wants to know the size of the buffer including null terminators.

That took me a moment to figure out.

Coolest project.... SharePoint sucks, so I wrote an app to extend it into something that is useful.

The app consists of:
- a custom SharePoint event receiver to maintain a custom retention setup
- a custom feature to enable users to tag documents as related to each other
- a custom search experience with custom views and previews
- a .Net windows service to sync the data into a SQL database
- a .Net MVC application to manage the reporting and notifications system
- a notifications system in .Net
- custom SharePoint approval workflow
- a PHP site that maintains a full backup of every document in the event that SharePoint goes down

I was the only developer on the entire project and while I asked for backup they never provided it. So if anything happens to me... And since I am a good dev, my code is self documenting and someone will need to telepathically link to me to find out the multiple places that all of this is running (like five different servers including both windows and Linux).

The whole thing, I have about 18 months invested into it ;)

Office 365 sucks if you want to connect a 3rd party service to your Windows Outlook. Will not read my calendar or let me sync unless I move everything to Outlook.com. No way I'm doing that.

Am i the only one who stop watching conference whenever a Windows developer comes in and try to give his piece of shitty advice cause trust me guy 99% of times this advice is linked to some shitty promotion of their twat service their cloud,test labs whatever . Fucking waste of one hour . Microsoft is a bag of shit company

Can someone recommend a good, free and easy to use service (web or windows app) for mobile apps prototype, mockups, etc. I want to create a visually rich and possibly clickable prototype for a mobile app idea before development.

Me: I want to deploy a simple WCF Service in a Docker container on Windows Server....

Docker Whale: nah bro....

Me: but but but you have been working with Windows for about a year this should be a simple simple task

Docker Whale: here let me your IP address every time so you can't ping locally or guess what I'm going to next.

I was a bit confused when my supervisor told me to use Windows VM through Vagrant for testing environment. AFAIK each VM should be treated as a single machine, so it requires a Win license.

There are several criterias for us to be able to use Win WM legally.
One of them is Qualified Multitenant Hoster (QMTH) Program from MS, it authorizes qualified 3rd-party hosting service providers to host customers’ Win VM. Other option is to check if we have on-premise dedicated use rights.

I don't know if we fulfill any of the criteria. I don't want to cause any trouble so I am not gonna ask my supervisor about it.

I have a dream that one day companies will understand that most people who pirate music/movies/games etc. do it because they don't have enough money or because they can't get them any other way. They don't lose money, as those people are not able to buy their products anyway, instead, they gain supporters and possible future clients. Piracy is one of the reasons Windows is the king OS(prove me wrong...) and also the reason Game of Thrones is the most popular show on the planet. Instead of hunting torrent site founders maybe they could, I don't know, build great and cheap services. Spotify is such a service, no reason to pirate music anymore, but everything else still lies in the middle ages...

My task for today: RDP into a vm of windows server 2008, use winSCP to ftp into the client's server, pull down approx 900 images, renaming the 200 or so duplicate filenames then upload them to a file sharing service...

THEN I have to pull them down onto my machine, optimise them, and then reverse the entire process, again manually renaming the duplicates.

!rant

I had that installation of windows 3 to 4 years now.
I'm using a third party software for backup so everyday at 23:00 the backup service starts. The image is stored on a second HDD.
First i want to point out that i set up the windows maintenance around that time too. So any updates should occur then and i remember finding my PC at login screen couple of times meaning a restart had taken place.
Everything was fine all this time.
Couple of days ago i returned home late around 2 am to find a blue screen saying that the computer did not boot property the last time. Had two options, just restart or try to fix.
Of course i will fix it, come on.
Everything failed. Everything. Even safe mode won't boot.
Who cares i have the back up system image. Boot from the bootable usb stick and restore. Well nothing is happening. It's just freezing at 5%. Cancel. Try again. Cancel. Verify the image. Success! Try again! Nothing.
Damn. Im really tired, off to bed.
Woke up tried fixing and restore but to no avail.
Fuck it i will just install Windows fresh. I was set up after an hour or so installed the necessary drivers and such. Let's see that image of any file i want to get back.
Image is corrupted. What the fuck? How? Damn it. Mount and recovery also failed.

That's it. I did not lose any important files. I save everything on a different drive and also the backup.
But I'm wondering what had gone wrong.
My guess windows rebooted when the backup was running. If that's the case shouldn't be a check if such service is running?

So my (windows 10) laptop decided to suddenly forget about its Bluetooth capability. And about its Bluetooth hardware.

Now, I did not restart my system, I just left it idle for a while. Heck, I played rainbow six before leaving it idle (with a Bluetooth mouse, of course)

Tried checking for the settings (didn't find any settings related to Bluetooth service), didn't find it in device manager, useful the troubleshooter (bastard says the problem is I have no Bluetooth hardware installed), tried restarting the system, checked in bios menu (couldn't see hardware info printed in bios system info), tried updating/reinstalling the driver.

The hell am I supposed to do?

Here , I am posting some questions so plzz reply in comment 😄

1. VScode or Atom
2. Flutter or Kotlin
3. Android dev or Web dev
4. Cpp or Java
5. Windows or Mac
6. Product based or Service based
7. Stack overflow or GitHub
8. Full stack or single stack
9. MEAN or MERN
10. Programmer or Devloper

Relatively often the OpenLDAP server (slapd) behaves a bit strange.

While it is little bit slow (I didn't do a benchmark but Active Directory seemed to be a bit faster but has other quirks is Windows only) with a small amount of users it's fine. slapd is the reference implementation of the LDAP protocol and I didn't expect it to be much better.

Some years ago slapd migrated to a different configuration style - instead of a configuration file and a required restart after every change made, it now uses an additional database for "live" configuration which also allows the deployment of multiple servers with the same configuration (I guess this is nice for larger setups). Many documentations online do not reflect the new configuration and so using the new configuration style requires some knowledge of LDAP itself.
It is possible to revert to the old file based method but the possibility might be removed by any future version - and restarts may take a little bit longer. So I guess, don't do that?

To access the configuration over the network (only using the command line on the server to edit the configuration is sometimes a bit... annoying) an additional internal user has to be created in the configuration database (while working on the local machine as root you are authenticated over a unix domain socket). I mean, I had to creat an administration user during the installation of the service but apparently this only for the main database...

The password in the configuration can be hashed as usual - but strangely it does only accept hashes of some passwords (a hashed version of "123456" is accepted but not hashes of different password, I mean what the...?) so I have to use a single plaintext password... (secure password hashing works for normal user and normal admin accounts).

But even worse are the default logging options: By default (atleast on Debian) the log level is set to DEBUG. Additionally if slapd detects optimization opportunities it writes them to the logs - at least once per connection, if not per query. Together with an application that did alot of connections and queries (this was not intendet and got fixed later) THIS RESULTED IN 32 GB LOG FILES IN ≤ 24 HOURS! - enough to fill up the disk and to crash other services (lessons learned: add more monitoring, monitoring, and monitoring and /var/log should be an extra partition). I mean logging optimization hints is certainly nice - it runs faster now (again, I did not do any benchmarks) - but ther verbosity was way too high.

The worst parts are the error messages: When entering a query string with a syntax errors, slapd returns the error code 80 without any additional text - the documentation reveals SO MUCH BETTER meaning: "other error", THIS IS SO HELPFULL... In the end I was able to find the reason why the input was rejected but in my experience the most error messages are little bit more precise.

After having to develop on windows for 2 years I had to make a websocket based communications service for Linux. It was just so nice having proper tools again...

I started my new job. Apparently I am responsible for "Transfer Services" and the networking equipment installed in the plant.
The system works in the standard way that Warehouse Management Systems talks to one of our TS servers and they give instructions to underlying controllers, It's some kind of tcp relay. Does anyone from you worked on this layer? I am trying to find some resource on the internet about windows server running this kind of service can't find anything. I would like to do some research and prepare adequately. Would be nice to hear your opinion. Thanks.

Two security researchers have published details about a vulnerability in the Windows Printing Service which impacts all Windows versions.

According to a Report of ZDNet : The vulnerability codenamed 'PrintDemon' which is located in Windows Print Spooler (Windows component responsible for managing print operations). The service sends data to be printed to a USB port for physically connected printers. In a report published, security researchers Alex Ionescu & Yarden Shafir said they found a bug in this old component that can be abused to hijack the Printer Spooler internal mechanism. The bug can not be used to break into a Windows client remotely over the internet, so it's not something that could be exploited to hack Windows systems over the internet.

Spent my Sunday building a container program for the Minecraft Bedrock dedicated server because I wanted to run it as a Windows service so my partner could play our local multiplayer realm while I am offline.

If you just run the standard executable as a service it risks world corruption on exit and requires a restart when changing whitelist or permission settings.

Pretty happy with how it turned out.

This is a repost of an original rant posted on a request for "Community Feedback" from Atlassian. You know, Atlassian? Those beloved people behind such products as :

• Thing I Love™
• Other Thing You Used One Time™
• Platform Often Mentioned in Suicide Notes, Probably™*

Now this rant was written in early 2022 while I was working in an Azure Cloud Engineer role that transformed into me being the company's main Sysadmin/Project Manager/Hiring Manager/Network Admin/Graphic Designer.

While trying to simultaneously put out over 9000 fires with one hand, and jangling keys in the face of the Owner/Arsonist with the other, I was also desperately implementing Jira Service Desk. Normally this wouldn't have been as much of a priority as it was, but the software our support team was using had gone past 15 years old, then past extended support, then the lone developer died, then it didn't work on Windows 10, then only functioned thanks to a dev cohort long past creating a keygen....which was now broken. So we needed a solution *now*.

The previous solution was shit of a different tier. The sight of it would make a walking talking anthropomorphised sentient puddle of dogshit (who both eats and produces further dookie derivatives) blush with embarrassment. The CD-ROM/Cereal Box this software came in probably listed features like "Stores Your Customer's First AND (or) Last Name!" or "Windows ME Downgrade Disk Included!" and "NEW: Less(-ish) Genocide(s)"!

Despite this, our brain/fearless leader decided this would be a great time to have me test, implement, deploy, and train everyone up on a new solution that would suck your toes, sound your shaft, and that he hadn't reminded me that I was a lazy sack enough lately.

One day, during preliminary user testing I received an email letting me know that the support team was having issues with a Customer's profile on our new support desk. Thanks to our Owner/Firestarter/Real World Micheal Scott being deep in his latest project (fixing our "All 5 devs quit in the last 12 months and I can't seem to hire any new ones" issue (by buying a ping pong table)), I had a bit of fortuitous time on my hands to investigate this issue. I had spent many hours of overtime working on this project, writing custom integrations and automations, so what I found out was crushing.

Below is the (digitally) physical manifestation of my rage after realising I would have to create / find / deal with a whole new method for support to manage customer contacts.

I'm linking to the original forum thread because you kind of need to have the pictures embedded in said reply to get really inhale the "Jira-Rant" ambiance. The part where I use several consecutive words as anchor links to tickets with other people screaming into the void gets a bit sweet n' savoury too - having those hyperlinks does improve the je ne say what of it all.

bit.ly/JIRANT (Case Sensitive)

--------------------------

There is some good news at the end of this brown n' squirty rainbow though!
Nice try silly little Jira button, you can't ruin *my* 2022!

• I was able to forget all about Jira a month later when I received a surprise vacation home! (To be there while my Mom passed away).
• Eventually work stress did catch up to me - but my boss thoughtfully gave me a nice long vacation! (By assaulting *while* firing me (for emailing in a vacation request while he was a having a bad (see:normal) day))

I don't know why people are complaining about windows updates while they can stop the update service from service manager. I did that wile I was using windows.
Moral of the story: I use linux. 😜

Fuck windows server. Fuck infosec. Every time they roll out windows updates shit breaks. From windows service get stuck in "stopping" state to dropping network interface. Why the fuck are we still using this to host a simple API or NSERVICEBUS service?? Don't know whether to laugh or cry. Fml.

So as a personal project for work I decided to start data logging facility variables, it's something that we might need to pickup at some point in the future so decided to take the initiative since I'm the new guy.
I setup some basic current loop sensors are things like gas line pressures for bulk nitrogen and compressed air but decided to go with a more advanced system for logging the temperature and humidity in the labs. These sensors come with 'software' it's a web site you host internally. Cool so I just need to build a simple web server to run these PoE sensors. No big deal right, it's just an IIS service. Months after ordering Server 2019 though SSC I get 4 activation codes 2 MAK and 2 KMS. I won the lottery now i just have to download the server 2019 retail ISO and... Won't take the keys. Back to purchasing, "oh I can download that for you, what key is yours". Um... I dunno you sent me 4 Can I just get the link, "well you have to have a login". Ok what building are you in I'll drive over with a USB key (hoping there on the same campus), "the download keeps stopping, I'll contact the IT service in your building". a week later I get an install ISO and still no one knows that key is mine. Local IT service suggests it's probably a MAK key since I originally got a quote for a retail copy and we don't run a KMS server on the network I'm using for testing. We'll doesn't windows reject all 4 keys then proceed to register with a non-existent KMS server on the network I'm using for testing. Great so now this server that is supposed to connected to a private network for the sensors and use the second NIC for an internet connection has to be connected to the old network that I'm using for testing because that's where the KMS server seems to be. Ok no big deal the old network has internet except the powers that be want to migrate everything to the new more secure network but I still need to be connected to the KMS server because they sent me the wrong key. So I'm up to three network cards and some of my basic sensors are running on yet another network and I want to migrate the management software to this hardware to have all my data logging in one system. I had to label the Ethernet ports so I could hand over the hardware for certification and security scans.

So at this point I have my system running with a couple sensors setup with static IP's because I haven't had time to setup the DNS for the private network the sensors run on. Local IT goes to install McAfee and can't because it isn't compatible with anything after 1809 or later, I get a message back that " we only support up to 1709" I point out that it's server 2019, "Oh yeah, let me ask about that" a bunch of back and forth ensues and finally Local IT get's a version of McAfee that will install, runs security scan again i get a message back. " There are two high risk issues on your server", my blood pressure is getting high as well. The risks there looking at McAfee versions are out of date and windows Defender is disabled (because of McAfee).

There's a low risk issue as well, something relating to the DNS service I didn't fully setup. I tell local IT just disable it for now, then think we'll heck I'll remote in and do it. Nope can't remote into my server, oh they renamed it well that's lot going to stay that way but whatever oh here's the IP they assigned it, nope cant remote in no privileges. Ok so I run up three flights of stairs to local IT before they leave for the day log into my server yup RDP is enabled, odd but whatever let's delete the DNS role for now, nope you don't have admin privileges. Now I'm really getting displeased, I can;t have admin privileges on the network you want me to use to support the service on a system you can't support and I'm supposed to believe you can migrate the life safety systems you want us to move. I'm using my system to prove that the 2FA system works, at this rate I'm going to have 2FA access to a completely worthless broken system in a few years. good thing I rebuilt the whole server in a VM I'm planning to deploy before I get the official one back. I'm skipping a lot of the ridiculous back and forth conversations because the more I think about it the more irritated I get.

Wanacry didn't touch me yet, my gaming machine is on Windows, I disabled the update service, I haven't restarted it for 2 months now...
Now doing an update, just in case

My laptop is dual booted with antergos, my work files are all on onedrive, so if something happened to my laptop it wouldn't be the worst

Still disabling the update service after the update :P

Net Stop mycompany.service

InstallUtil.exe /u Myservice.exe

Sc Delete mycompany.service

InstallUtil.exe /i Myservice.exe

Net start mycompany.service

Docker never worked for me on windows
the service never starts
tried version 3 and 4 on 2 different machines

Even tho I really hate UI in .NET like Xamarin and Windows SDK
I still love reusing all of my C# service and extensions
Rather stay in .NET than learn JS and CSS

RIP GitHub

Take a service I like and pay for, a service that is about open source and collaboration, and sell it to a company that is complete garbage and has for years been hated for selling garbage overpriced software that is just terrible.

I’m not looking to argue about Windows (it’s garbage no matter how much you want it not to be) but Microsoft as a company is just not a fit for GitHub.

I’m not stupid though, I see the goal. The goal is that old school, shitty emperor use software teams will be more likely to use GitHub if it is owned my MS. On the same way that many of them force their employees to use garbage Windows machines because “it’s what we have always done”.

GitHub will become another shitty service that some people argue is good based on their ignorance
Of other options. This is sad.

TLDR: I fucking dislike this acquisition entirely and will immediately remove all private repos from GitHub and cancel my subscription on Monday if it is announced.

Halp meh, plz... I have run across a problem and I have absolutely no idea how to go about solving it...

So basically I need to decrypt a TDES encrypted Azure service bus message. Can be done in a straightforward manner in .NET Framework solution with just your regular old System.Security.Cryptography namespace methods. As per MSDN docs you'd expect it to work in a .NET Core solution as well... No, no it doesn't. Getting an exception "Padding is invalid and cannot be removed". Narrowed the cause down to just something weird and undocumented happening due to Framework <> Core....

And before someone says 'just use .NET Framework then', let me clarify that it's not a possibility. While in production it could be viable, I'm not developing on a Windows machine...

How do I go about solving this issue? Any tips and pointers?

So I a using the ssh installed with git on Windows.
I am trying to forward a port on my internal network server which is also my ssh server. I have exposed my network server on a forwarded port on my router. When I try to forward using this command I get a connection reset on my web service on my server.

ssh -nNT -p <port on router> -L 8000:192.168.0.22:8000 <sshuser@router>

I can log into ssh normally. So I am really confused. the 192.x.x.x address is the internal ip of the server. On a browser I try to connect to the 127.0.0.1:8000. It says the connection is reset. I assume it is being refused. So it tries to connect to something, but it fails.

I can connect to the web server from within the internal network via 192.168.0.22:8000. Really confused as to what is failing here.