Trains!

But I also believe anything could be geeky if you're invested enough in it, so I'm also into pole-dancing

No work is going to be tolerable if you don't enjoy it. If you got into programming or IT or any industry simply for the money you can earn doing it, you're in for a BAD TIME.

I love computers, linux, programming, configuration, automation, and problem solving. So I love what I do. I am currently three weeks into 13 weeks of parental leave, and I have been having dreams about work at night.

The best piece of advice I can offer to someone who has trouble getting motivated is: make sure to like it first.

Man, I am not a stickers guy, but I am seriously considering putting one or more of these on my apple monitor at work.

Tracking status of an item from a Kickstarter I backed. Shipping to me in the US. Yeah, that should be here any day now.

I got my new(to me) MacBook Pro last week, provided by work. I've got all my setup and config done, for the most part, and I've noticed something.

Performance is shit. Has anyone else noticed this about the 2017 and later models? The 2015 model I had before was much, much smoother. Just zooming windows, a previously butter-smooth experience, is noticeably choppy. I/O performance is garbage too. I have a small iotest script that just writes a string a couple hundred times to disk, deletes it, and repeats this activity 100,000 times. On my Linux machine at home with six year old hardware, this takes about three seconds. On my new system76 laptop it takes just over a second. On the 2017 MacBook Pro, it takes about forty seconds.

The 2017 and 2018 models are a direct downgrade in performance. Why isn't anyone talking about this?

Trello's android app doesn't give you the option to choose a board when you make a widget. It just picks one itself based on seemingly arbitrary requirements. Thankfully, trello has a brilliant open API, so there are several capable third party apps.

A site I manage in my spare time with a couple thousand normal users was getting attacked by a Chinese botnet. All the requests were coming from only two subnets. Easy to block. Feels like this was only the vanguard. Prelude to the real attack. I'm thinking about moving the site to its own server, so it won't affect my other sites. There at least if it gets kneeled, it'll only be that site.

This is my laptop's desktop, as I currently have it set. This sexually arouses me with its legendary beauty.

Show me yours.

If you have a system76 laptop and are frustrated with the battery life, like I was, maybe I can help you. Following a mishmash of instructions I found online, I've extended my battery life from about two hours to almost five.

It would seem that Australia just criminalized privacy. The world needs to watch, so this shit isn't repeated elsewhere.

It's interesting that AAA games are becoming analogous to pop music, as they relate to the medium of which they are part. E3 is just a bunch of trailers for rushed sequels to existing, played-out franchises. The big price tags are almost universally not worth it, as these games typically release with major bugs, and often rely on grind-enforced microtransactions.

Meanwhile, indie games keep getting better, more innovative, and remain reasonably priced. Ubisoft, EA, Bethesda, Rockstar, and the rest of the big-budget studios can eat my ass.

A vendor gave us what is turning out to be a very stable storage appliance/software, so we're happy for that. But even so, disks fail. So we need an automated way to identify, troubleshoot, isolate, and begin ticketing against disk failures. Vendor promised us a nice REST API. That was six months ago. The temporary process of SSHing(as root) to every single appliance(60-200 per site, dozens of sites) to run vendor storage audit commands remains our go-to means of automation.

I'm not a fan of X display managers. I prefer to have my machine boot directly to the virtual console, and if I want to run X, I can start it with startx. Does anyone else do that? If so, what do you put in your .xinitrc?

If you're using the adwaita-dark gtk theme, you may have noticed that the text entry fields on lots and lots of sites make your text almost impossible to read, using firefox. You can fix that by creating/editing the, "widget.content.gtk-theme-override" key(in about:config), setting it to "Adwaita" and restarting firefox.

Out for a nice walk on a unseasonably warm morning.

I need to convert lots and lots of lengthy hard-coded entities into backend objects, as I'm tired of pushing new commits every time something superficial needs to change.

Also, I need to figure out continuous integration. The guy who was going to help with that just left the company, and I was using his eventual forthcoming help as an excuse not to take responsibility for learning about it myself.

I need to learn golang and start converting some code to it, to see if the performance compares to the perl that's currently in place. Perl is brilliant, but aside from me, only old people know it, at my office. That definitely creates a longterm supportability issue.

We have a three bedroom house that fits us perfectly, or did anyway. In the upstairs there is a master bedroom which my wife and I share, and two smaller bedrooms. One is my son's room and was his nursery when he was smaller, and the other is currently being used as my office.

We had a second child-- a little girl --in October. As she is still very small, she sleeps in a bassinet in our bedroom, but those days are numbered. She will need her own room within a couple months, for naps and for her to sleep all night on her own. That means my office will soon have a crib, dresser, and changing table in it, and I will be unable to use my computer after the wife and kids are in bed.

For this eventuality, I've been preparing what I call my, "table kit." Costco sells these really nice collapsible plastic crates. I have filled one with computer things, with the intention being that when my office is not available to me, I have a crate with everything I need in it, and can quickly set up at the dinner table. When I'm done, I can quickly tear down and pack everything up into that collapsible crate, so none of my equipment will "live" at the table.

My question is: what would you put in your table kit? I currently have a System76 Oryx Pro, a 23" LED display, displayport cable, power cables, mouse, keyboard, microUSB, and type-C cable, Bluetooth headphones, and I'm trying to decide whether I'll need a laptop stand. What would you pack?

Why doesn't steam have a, "don't throw me under the bus" option?

We use jira at my company. It's great for me, because no ticketing system's UI is worth a shit, but jira's API is excellent. But we're switching to a new system that is an absolute piece of garbage. Every page is 100% Javascript, so no source can ever be viewed, and the URL never changes to reflect what's onscreen. If you know a ticket number, no URL will ever get you straight to it. You have to navigate multiple slow-loading 25MB piles of Javascript to reach what you're seeking. And most damning of all: the new system has an API, but our highest management is withholding access to it, claiming it breeds laziness.

Is amazing the kind of shit you have to swallow when your management has regular meetings with really really super extremely good-looking sales people.

Hyperlinks with JavaScript

.......

lots of time for training...

Merry Christmas everyone! 🎄
If you are home with family, hope you enjoy solving their problems or explaining Bitcoin!

Technologies come and go, but it has a lot in common. Set priorities right. Invest 80% of your learning time in fundamentals. Leave 20% for frameworks, libraries and tools.

𝕷𝖔𝖔𝖐 𝖆𝖙 𝖒𝖞 𝖋𝖆𝖓𝖈𝖞 𝖋𝖔𝖓𝖙𝖘.

fellow web developer helping me with debuging

A committed developer...
(took ages to make)

Overheard this conversation today:
1: look at this! My shiny new iPhone can measure stuff!
2: how accurate is it?
1: not very, it is pretty buggy.
2: how did the bugs get in there?
3: it is an apple so

Does anyone else think the new Chrome design looks a little like Firefox Quantum?

Fucking Edge. I fixed a "bug" and now the bug-pointer tells me a line with only a comment causes a problem. Yea. Genius browser.

It's an "UNKNOWN" error btw, great debugging!