Recently our management department discovered the advantages of setting up CloudFlare DNS and their CND for a website. In our case that made perfect sense and also helps a lot with the performance.

A while ago someone noticed that in the backend of the CMS the site uses, stuff that is being loaded via AJAX is not loaded at all and just displays an empty container.

3 hours into debugging I discovered why: Someone thought it would be a good idea to base a condition on whether there was a certain HTML comment inside an element, rather than using a class or something else.

A comment.

The HTML minifier removed that, so I ended up having to disable HTML minifying, at least for the backend.

Thanks, whoever thought it would be a good idea to base logic on the existence of a comment.

So apparently Firefox can't handle (quick) animations from opacity 0 to opacity greater-than-zero and glitches around. Instead you need to animate starting from something greater than 0, like 0.001.

I had to debug this shit and it just adds to my reasons to dislike this browser.

So apparently our windows domain admin now disabled screensavers.

I was always happy to return to my desk while looking at the pixel city screensaver I had and now it's just black.

I am mildly angered 😑

So I've tried to unsubscribe myself from a newsletter for the past two weeks ...

It's a service I used exactly once and apparently I got signed up for their newsletter somehow.

When I got the first mail two weeks ago, I clicked that unsubscribe button in the footer to get to their unsubscribe landingpage and hit that confirmation button.

It said something like "... within 24 hours ..." and I was okay with that, but I kept getting a newsletter / offer / whatever every single day for the following two weeks.

Today I figured out, why the unsubscription seemingly had no effect.

I used a GMail alias for that website, so my address contained a + character.
Apparently they just put that mail address into some unsubscribe link template without urlencoding it, so that + turned into a space and they attempted to unsubscribe some mail address with a space instead of a + ...

Remember kids, always urlencode stuff in URLs!

Fuck TeamViewer.

I've been using it to control my home PC desktop from remote for a few years now (booted PC via Wake-On-LAN, done stuff, shutdown). I started using Chrome Remote Desktop a while ago too, but its ports are blocked at work, so I had to rely on TV some more.

Recently TV more often told me that I was offline (but I wasn't) and more importantly they started blocking my connections due to "commercial usage" (it's my private shit, yo), so now I've moved on to RDP via SSH.

That really makes me feel relieved as I wanted to move away from it for a while now anyways and SSH tunnels also are the real shit.

Today was a good day.

I'm starting to lose faith in humanity ... I mean recruiters ...
But then I start thinking to myself: "Did I ever HAVE faith in them?" 🤔

A friend found this Microsoft link a few weeks ago. The background image is missing because it's been removed from imgur and it's still broken to date 🤔

https://microsoft.com/upgradecenter...

I recently updated all the stuffs on my Raspberry Pi 3.
Now nano* occasionally NULs out files I edit 🤔

*best CLI editor ever, change my mind

So the free WiFi at the Paris airport CDG bugged out for me earlier. Since it doesn't allow you to sign out, I had Schrodinger's WiFi as the login page said I'm connected but I wasn't (nothing worked).

I wonder when there will be the first manufacturer to introduce the "cool" new notch design to normal screens. 🤔

Spotify just asked me for my ZIP code (to verify my family plan again after like a year).

I typed 00000 and they accepted that 🤔

Duck sounds!

https://google.com/search/...

Being lazy is ok.
But I believe there certainly is a special place in hell for people that use "transition: all" in CSS.

So today I found out why I couldn't SCP stuff to one of my servers for the last 6 months.

It was a fricking "echo" in the .bashrc script (well, in a script that got sourced in there).

(Read: https://stackoverflow.com/q/...)

!dev

This is a follow-up to a previous rant: https://devrant.com/rants/1303341

I found out that when I turn on the sink faucet on hot and let that running for a minute, I can shower with decent-ish temperatures again 🤔

... meanwhile even the cold water setting yields hot water because of the temperatures outside.

Looks like that took some time 🤔

Every website we craft at work has some email substitution logic so that addresses you see on the site don't actually exist in the HTML source like that (you wouldn't find them in a format like "foo@example.com").

Instead the @ and the period right before the TLD get replaced with something else (to prevent (dumb) spam bots from using that address and blast it with junk).

Some people replaced them with images in the past (ew), replaced the @ with "(at)" or other stuff.

I made it a habit to render the @ and . by replacing them with span tags which then get a ::before in CSS that contains "content: '@';", so that the @ is visible but is not actually inside the HTML source code.

The classes for these spans then have a random name (persistent for that website though). The first one was called "move-along-nothing-to-see-here", but then I started naming them after Star Wars quotes.

One website's @ class is called "that-s-no-moon" (Obi Wan), others are called "i-have-a-bad-feeling-about-this" (Han Solo), "powerful-you-have-become-the-dark-side-I-sense-in-you." (Yoda) and "these-are-not-the-droids-you-are-looking-for" (Obi Wan).

So apparently I cannot save my Google Maps "Less interested in ..." food place preferences when my selection includes "Vegan". 🤔

So I wanted to check on an iOS app in my company's Apple account but ...

I don't know, this thing used to be a login.

Did anyone see this guy's tweets yet?

Read them, they're especially interesting when put into the context of the current GitHub affairs.

https://twitter.com/jamiebuilds/...

Sometimes I wonder how software development in (bigger) teams worked in the 90s.

Take the first Pokémon games for example. It was the mid-90s and the final product would be Assembler code that goes onto a cartridge with limited space.

I believe version control systems didn't really exist back then (Git & Mercurial: 2005, SVN: 2004). So probably people took backups of the chunks of code they worked on, copied around a stitched-together code, threw everything together at the end of the day, etc. etc. ...

Does anyone here know if there is some kind of documentary about that topic or did anyone here experience that first-hand?

It would be really interesting to see how that stuff worked back then 😊

„We love open source, so we'll just buy all of it!“
— Microsoft, 2018/06/04

Does someone else have that too?

Sometimes at night when I'm creating something new (or adding to something) and I get into that zone when stuff suddenly works better than expected or when the thing I'm making is just awesome, I feel a need to turn on "evil" music, such as music with deep voiced male choirs, the soundtrack of Portal 2, some classic music like those evol geniuses in movies or comparable.

It just makes me feel like I'm gonna destroy the planet once my evil creation is done.

The whois service for the legacy top-level domain for Germany (.de) is one of the most fucked up things on the internet.

For years now they've restricted the whois service to notice you about their website information service (https://denic.de/en, you run a search and get information about the domain) which already cost you an unnecessary amount of time if you simply want to lookup something.

A while back they changed it so that you need to state whether you want to look it up fotr informative purposes or business purposes, then they changed it so that you need to supply a reason in a text box.

The new (GDPR) way is that you only get the connectivity status ("connect", "free") via whois and the nameservers on the website (without supplying a reason, which actually is an improvement). Everything this either is for executive authorities or the domain owner (by entering their mail address or zip code).

Germany - the land of "We can opt out of any standard because we can and since theaws changed we can also behave like dickbutts".

Adding the GDPR now only fed the trolls even more.

I've started looking into stuffs like GraphQL and Linked Data (though I've used Micro Data before on websites) today and while fiddling with stuff, I found this handy tool:

https://search.google.com/structure...

I'm trying to create JSON-LD data and it's really helpful to have something validate my test data 🙂

So I just released a thing I've been working on for the past few days and I'm very glad that it's finally public!

It's a thing that you can use on your website to let the user choose which cookie they want to allow.

https://github.com/metaa/cookiebox

It's worth playing around with the cookie panel in your developer console of your browser on the example page, too!

https://metaa.github.io/cookiebox/

I'd be glad to get some serious feedback and I hope it could be useful to someone out there. 😊

That feeling when the direction lights of your car and the car ahead of you are in full sync.

Hell yeah!

... oh ... wait ... 😒

I hate when I'm being questioned when I wander off to the kitchen to get a sandwich for 5 minutes when the smokers at the office have their sixth smoking break that usually takes about 10 minutes.

Let me enjoy my non-smoker breaks 😒

So some client has their own server with their website that we made and maintain.

Recently they've revoked writing permissions for our user for whatever reason but expect us to change stuff.

This has been the case for a few weeks now and they still haven't given us writing permission back, but insist of us making the changes.