Why do I get 'modify' links on everyone elses comments?
Am I running as an administrator?
https://devrant.com/rants/2303484/...

Just for fun. Running is healthy.

I have often been impressed by Googles natural language tech. Today they have a new functionality in the video conferencing tool meet. You can activate captions. If the audio is reasonable it is quite good, even picking up some words I missed. But it also produces some hilarious fails. Still they do fantastic work on this!

Really big problem with a detail in a Google example code. Working on a reporting service for Googles ad manager, pulling statistics based on Advertiser ID. Made good progress till I hit a wall trying to make the script work with command line arguments. All other arguments populated nicely but the choice of download format would not work. I read the documentation and studied Googles example. The example feeds a static function value "ExportFormat::CSV_DUMP". Worked. Changing the format worked too. But it was impossible to change it dynamically. I tried for hours but only got different error messages. In desperation I started reading the Google API source code for the function. Turns out the function called actually expects a string! Just giving the format string, like "CSV_DUMP" works perfectly. And makes a lot of sense. Have no idea why the examples uses ExportFormat and Paamayim Nekudotayim. Maybe they improved the code and stopped using a static function for this and forgot to change the example. Somehow the example also works...

What I like about newish laptops is that the USB-C display port easily allows three screens. One of my work setups look like this. Complete with my therapy stone that I took from an Irish beach. It is very pleasant to the touch thanks to being moulded since eternity by the Atlantic ocean. Sunshine makes it pleasantly warm. The external screens are old 1680x1050 Dells. The are perfect for my old mans eyes. And my aging Das Keyboard is holding up well. If it's keys would have had imprinted letters they would have worn off by now.

Sometimes I feel like an idiot and this time Google searches are not my friends. I have managed to get all the information I need from a Google API in one single call. It's all in the returned object. But the values are protected and they run deep. Now is there no elegant way to read them? I cannot imagine writing this:
$page->getResults()->$lineItem->getTargeting()->getCustomTargeting()->getChildren() just to find an Array inside the object. I want the first one so it goes on [0]->getChildren()->getKeyId()->getValueIds()
What is it I fail to grasp? Sure I could make it a bit more bearable with a loop but there must be a better way than iterating a new method for every level in a deep object! I understand the value of protection but I just want to bloody READ the values! And no, I wont var_dump.

How can instagram be even remotely popular? It's just unbelievable shit. Clearly not made by people who know anything about photography. I mean routinely cropping images in app and on the web in a quite arbitrary fashion. If your picture is wide or high you cannot even upload it without cropping. Instagram is minimalistic in all the wrong ways. A useless tool for the snapper with little brain and no interest.
Nobody uses Flickr, which is quite a good service. It's VHS vs Beta / Commodore vs Atari / Trump vs Roosevelt but much much worse!

In Swedish the phrase "Jag har lekt med docker hela dagen!" is just one letter from meaning "I have been playing with dolls all day!". This is a pointless observation but I illustrates how happy I am after a whole day of configuring a project in docker. With good progress and learning. Not that I enjoyed playing with dolls as a kid but with with Airfix model airplanes. But I am sure the joy is much the same.

Woz eyeing my book shelf. Hadn't noticed this in a while. Printed in 1985.

Is it just me? Or is devRant nowadays full of kids who rant about windows updates but remain ms fanboys? And think an index should start with 1? And hate JavaScript because they know zilch about it?

Why don't more people use/talk about Gnome Builder? I just stumbled over it in the Ubuntu software store. It's amazing! Fastest editor I have used and with so sane functionality. And great Vim (and Emacs) support. It should be much more popular I think. Dropping Komodo edit now. Komodo has a couple of small advantages but is just soooo slow to use and start up by comparison.

Was reading an ebook about Golang in the garden. Having read the first chapter I looked up. And only then noticed this view... What is the philosophical lesson?

What does air conditioners and computers have in common?
- Both become useless when you open windows.

When you find a webdev link marked MDN and think "Oh yes!" then click it and find yourself in MSDN. Oh no!

Mozilla Dev Net is home away from home, MS Dev Net is further away than Tipperary.

Help! I purged the running kernel!

This I did not do right. On a whim I decided to upgrade my desktop while working on the laptop. So I ran do-release-upgrade on my Ubuntu 14.04 install. Carelessly. Well into it I remembered that this box had been down this road several times and houses it's system on a tiny /boot partition from the time of 11.04 or something. Well the boot partition was soon full. A bit of a problem for the installation... I started to apt-get purge old kernels. There where these shiny new 4.4.0 kernels and some old ones starting on 3. Be gone! When Ubuntu suddenly logged me out I realised that I of course was still running 14.04 and one of those old kernels, that where now gone. Felt like the idiot I was. Thing is that when I logged back in (yes I could!) I was running a new kernel. I rebuilt grub and rebooted. Into a shiny new working Ubuntu 16.04 LTS. Idiot proof stuff this. Impressed again.

AWS dynamodb. It's got a list of reserved word longer than a winter night at the polar circle. It automatically creates column names from json post keys. It does not check them against the reserved words. Then it fails all queries because there is a column with an offending name, called Uuid. The reserved words limitation is case insensitive, thank you. Lost hours of work today because of it. Right now I think AWS is JUNK!

My 8 year old daughter wanted a subject for hear Hama beads project. I suggested her favourite games hero Bomb Jack, front left. He turned out great I thought, so we spent the evening of Finlands independence day making an eight bit bead display. So 8 bit motifs, Hama beads and an eight year old mix really well! And of course Santa needs to be there too.

!!rant
Whenever I have a problem in WordPress searching on Google is hopeless. There are no solutions. Just garbage commercial modules and confusion. Like when scheduled jobs won't publish. It seems to be a common problem. No useful advice. But there is a module that will search for failed scheduled jobs and publish them, these people don't like the DRY principle much. When I have an issue in Drupal I don't always like the advice but there are always good links about it.

IE is finally Dead. On all the sites I can see stats for it's below 10℅ and on most closer to 5℅. Edge is at about 2℅. It's irrelevant! Rejoice!

Spending more time setting up tools and workflows like git, composer, docker, gulp etc etc etc than fucking coding anything! All this stuff was supposed to save time. And then these tools starts MESSING with each other!

Nobody has ever asked me to hack any accounts. What's wrong with me?

How come Galaxians, Bomb Jack, Defender, R-Type and Space Invaders are still the best video games? Or is there something wrong with me?

A relative path in real life! This office storage cupboard is to be moved to another room. The instructional note for the moving man reads "To the room furthest away".
Real relative paths has a familiar weakness, do not leave it half way for someone else to pick up!
../../../ on you all!

So fed up with this "Linux is hard to handle"-bull. If you want to do things the hard way, sure. But if you install a normal distribution like Ubuntu it's as close to "just works" as I have seen. Sure if you want to compile everything yourself into your perfect system it can be hard, but on windows or mac that's not hard, it's impossible.

Double tap to knock!

This morning I studied Zeno's dichotomy paradox. Conclusion: Before you can finish your project you must write half of it. And before that you must write one-fourth, before that one-eight and one-sixteenth and ... Thus your work is infinite and you will never finish it. And that is without any of the bugs!

If you are still contemplating writing anything, consider the amount of work there is in even one-sixtyfourth of your project. Just stop, and read some ancient philosophy instead! You will thank me.

oh, when you have to google to come up with a good descriptive variable name...

What did it tell me to???
Well, I was switching keyboards and started my desktop before i connected the new one. In my mind I was mocking the Mac. Now if I had a Mac it would not let me boot, stupid thing! Luckily I'm running Linux.
Butt wait! Never got that far! AMERICAN MEGANITWITS, if you ask me!