It's 2021.

Bluetooth still sucks balls.

That's all.

Job interview goes really well. Senior Dev 90-100k.

Ok, so for your "test" write up a proposal for a web based bulk email sending system with its own admin panel for building list, tracking emails, and with reporting.

I write up an estimate. Low ball the absolute fuck out of it because I'm trying to get a job. Know a few good libraries I can use to save some time. Figure I can just use sendmail, or PHPMailer, or NodeMailer for the emailing, and DataTables Editor for a simple admin CRUD with reporting. Write the thing up. Tell them they can have it in LAMP or Node.

Come in at 36 hours.

Then these fucking wanks told me they wanted me to actually do the project.

My exact response was:

"I bill $50 an hour, let me know"

They did not let me know.

Young devs, jobless devs, desperate devs. I've seen a fair amount of this. And for the right job I might go as high as maybe 4 - 6 hours of unpaid work for some "programming test". But please be careful. There are those who will try to exploit lack of experience or desperation for free work.

Achievement unlocked
Killed production database for 40 minutes

I lost my sanity and googled ”FUCK YOU XCODE YOU FUCKING PIECE OF SHIT”...

That's how I found devRant.

My mom died when I was 7, after which my dad bought me a Commodore 64 so I had something to lose myself in during the mourning process.

I learned everything about that system, from my first GOTO statement to sprite buffers, to soldering my own EPROM cartridges. My dad didn't deal with the loss so well, and became a missing person 5 years later when I was 12.

I got into foster care with a bunch of strict religious cultists who wouldn't allow electronics in the house.

So I ran away at 14, sub-rented a closet in a student apartment using my orphan benefits and bought a secondhand IBM computer. I spent about 16 hours a day learning about BSD and Linux, C, C++, Fortran, ADA, Haskell, Livescript and even more awful things like Visual Basic, ASP, Windows NT, and Active Directory.

I faked my ID (back then it was just a laminated sheet of paper), and got a job at 15-pretending-to-be-17 at one of the first ISPs in my country. I wrote the firmware and admin panel for their router, full of shitty CGI-bin ASP code and vulnerabilities.

That somehow got me into a job at Microsoft, building the MS Office language pack for my country, and as an official "conflict resolver" for their shitty version control system. Yes, they had fulltime people employed just to resolve VCS conflicts.

After that I worked at Arianespace (X-ray NDT, visualizing/tagging dicom scans, image recognition of faulty propellant tank welds), and after that I switched to biotech, first phytogenetics, then immunology, then pharmacokynetics.

In between I have grown & synthesized and sold large quantities of recreational drugs, taken care of some big felines, got a pilot license, taught IT at an elementary school, renovated a house, and procreated.

A lot of it was to prove myself to the world -- prove that a nearly-broke-orphan-high-school-dropout could succeed at life.

But hey, now I work for a "startup", so I guess I failed after all.

I guess I can do one of these a day or so. I've collected some novelties over the years.

First up is a Curta mechanical calculator. Before electronic calculators became a thing, these were the best portable calculators in the world. Notably, they were the calculator of choice in rally car sports.

They work by a series of helical gears that act as registers. A series of internal gears and value assignment switches apply an adjustable number of incrementations to those gears, multiplying gears and the tracking gears, once per "grind." The result is output as a number on top of the device. The "clear register" function is lifting the top ring, which releases the reverse lockout on the gears and a clockwise turn on the ring then resets them to their zero state.

They were designed by Curtz Herzstark, partly before WWII and partly while he was imprisoned in a Nazi concentration camp. He had filed a patent for it in 1938, shortly before his family's manufacturey became a weapons factory. During his imprisonment, in addition to nearly starving to death, he completed his plans for manufacturing of his calculator.

It had fun names like the, "pepper grinder," and "math grenade."

1. Have some issue with my code which spits out cryptic compiler error.

2. Ask on stack overflow, Reddit, etc for a solution.

3. Get scolded at for "not reading the documentation" and "asking questions which could be answered by just Googling". Still no clue what I'm doing wrong, or what the solution would be.

4. Find someone else's vaguely related problem.

5. Post my problematic code as the answer, with arrogant comment about OP being a retard for not figuring that out for themselves.

6. A dozen angry toxic nerds flock in to tell me how retarded and wrong I am, correcting me... solving my original problem.

7. Evil plan succeeded, my code compiles, and as a bonus I made the internet a worse place in the process.

I think if you tell a bunch of autistic neckbeards that "all coronaviruses are fundamentally incurable", you'd have a vaccine within a week.

I just gave a 20 minute presentation in front of fifty people, and apparently did well enough that I got five private compliments afterwards, including one from the vice president. 🥳

And all of that without a single drop of rum!

Wanna mess with users? Take

“OK” and “Cancel”.

You know what looks visually the same but means the opposite?

“NO” and “Confirm”.

Deploy that little ui update overnight and watch the world burn.

!dev

Bought a house. 😊

Webpage: It looks like you are using ad-blocker
Me: It looks like you are getting closed biatch.

$age++;

So apparently someone discovered an exploit in iOS devices which would make shitloads of devices jailbreakable and it can't be updated due to the chip being read-only.

I'm not an expert on this by far but hereby a source:
https://idownloadblog.com/2019/09/...

Again, I'm not an expert on this but it does seem awesome that a lot of devices (if I read it correctly) are jailbreakable now (when someone developed one with this exploit)!

I solved a big problem today. It made me feel fuckng amazing. I like my job.

P.S. I'm a QA Engineer

I made changes in production on Friday, surprisingly nothing has been reported yet!

I hate this trend of making a video out of every bit of information or tutorial you can find. Videos are slow, I cannot properly skip forward to the part I need and the people making these videos are hellbent on not editing out their mistakes to "be more genuine" or something fucking stupid like that.

I want some good old text-based guides. I want docs, READMEs and the like. I don't want to hear you coughing and spitting on your ultrawide monitor for 30 minutes only to find out what I need to know is in video 4 of your ongoing paid series.

WHEN DOCKER IMAGE NUMBER TWENTY-MOTHERFUCKING-TRILLION FAILS TO COMPILE /RENDER/WHAT-THE-FUCK-EVER THE GODDAMN DATA WITHOUT PROVIDING SUFFICIENT ERROR/HOWEVER-YOU-FUCKING-CALL-IT DEBUGGING INFORMATION.

I'M DONE. I. AM. SO. FUCKING. DONE.

I wrote (or, ended up with a very much alpha but usable version) a monitoring system a while back and completely forgot about its existence.

But, it's still running and a few days ago I was building a docker imagine on a system with not that many resources and after about 5 minutes I started getting notifications about a high load!

Then, while I had forgotten about it again, yesterday, I suddenly started getting notifications about websites on my main application server going down.
Logged in and all was good again after restarting nginx.

Gotta say that it feels quite awesome to be notified of shit going wrong by something I wrote myself while I forgot about its existence 😊

How do you call it when you ban a jihadist from your forum or server?

A taliBAN.

New neighbor came in yesterday, she cute, and apparently she also goes to the same college as me, though... when she came in last night to thank me she thought I was doing something illegal

Neighbor: "What are those?"
Me: "Lemme ex-"
Neighbor: "Are you doing [hacky hacky uwu]?"
Me: "First before you get the wrong-"
Neighbor: "I'm call-"
Me: "This is a fucking weather sattelite reciever ffs"

[Awkward silence]

Fast forward to today, landlady came in and immediately recognized my weather sattelite rig (I did it for a science fair before I graduated SHS), told neighbor she shouldn't worry because I have stuff like this everyday

God, if it wasn't for our landlady, I would have the police in my ass for neighbors getting the wrong idea...

Seriously nani the fuck

Some people make suicide seem like a viable option.

So I literally made a Gentoo ebuild just to install a OEM wallpaper..

I really need to do something with my life

Today, for fun, I wrote prime number generation upto 1000 using pure single MySQL query.

No already created tables, no procedures, no variables. Just pure SQL using derived tables.

So does this mean that pure SQL statements do not have the halting problem?

Putting an EXPLAIN over the query I could see how MySQL guessed that the total number of calculations would be 1000*1000 even before executing the query in itself and this is amazing ♥️

I have attached a screenshot of the query and if you are curious, I have also left below the plain text.

PS this was a SQL problem in Hackerrank.

MySQL query:

select group_concat(primeNumber SEPARATOR '&') from
(select numberTable.number as primeNumber from

(select cast((concat(tens, units, hundreds)+1) as UNSIGNED) as number from

(select 0 as units union select 1 union select 2 union select 3 union select 4 union select 5 union select 6 union select 7 union select 8 union select 9) unitsTable,
(select 0 as tens union select 1 union select 2 union select 3 union select 4 union select 5 union select 6 union select 7 union select 8 union select 9) tensTable,
(select 0 as hundreds union select 1 union select 2 union select 3 union select 4 union select 5 union select 6 union select 7 union select 8 union select 9) hundredsTable order by number) numberTable

inner join

(select cast((concat(tens, units, hundreds)+1) as UNSIGNED) as divisor from

(select 0 as units union select 1 union select 2 union select 3 union select 4 union select 5 union select 6 union select 7 union select 8 union select 9) unitsTable,
(select 0 as tens union select 1 union select 2 union select 3 union select 4 union select 5 union select 6 union select 7 union select 8 union select 9) tensTable,
(select 0 as hundreds union select 1 union select 2 union select 3 union select 4 union select 5 union select 6 union select 7 union select 8 union select 9) hundredsTable order by divisor) divisorTable

on (divisorTable.divisor<=numberTable.number and divisorTable.divisor!=1)
where numberTable.number%divisorTable.divisor=0
group by numberTable.number having count(*)<=1 order by numberTable.number) resultTable;

Me: we only got 40 minutes notice that we had to stay in late for a meeting with the USA team. Can we politely ask them to give us like a days notice in future? I can’t just stay late at any time, neither can the guys with kids to collect.

Manager: oh ok. I’m very sorry this has affected you. Here, let me explain why this is going to keep happening and you’ll need to deal with it.

My thoughts on programming:

As a child:
It is 100% magic

As a developer:
It is 65% if/else statements, 34% iterating an array, 1% actual amazing and unique code

so today at supermarket I was asked if my credit card has wifi ... apparently she meant if it's contactless

That moment that you come across a domain name which you thought would have definitely been taken already.

Came across strtoti.me. (php function for converting date/time strings into unix epoch's). Quickly wrote an api for it and put it online because fuck it, why not!

Feel free to use it as much as you want, I can't guarantee its availability unless it would become really popular but I can't imagine that.

URL: https://strtoti.me
API example: https://strtoti.me//... 20 20:15
API example (url encoded): https://strtoti.me//...

API documentation (not that good yet, might improve it..): https://strtoti.me

Well, let's see how this goes. Feedback appreciated but I currently have a shitload of projects to it doesn't have the highest priority right now!

Spend half the day setting up a dedicated server at work (including getting all the hardware together) and installing CentOS and tweaking around.

For a client? Oh no, there just literally wasn't anything else to do and I didn't want to sit around doing nothing or working on shell scripts AGAIN. (working in support (+ linux server management) and due to the holidays hardly any support requests come in)

*Hmmm, lets install nginx for fun*
"yum install ngi..."
*wait, let's compile from source and make it more fun!*

So yeah, that was my day, I guess.

This one is for devs and gamers.
But first some background story.

My girlfriend is special. Not just generically lovey mush mush special. She is 1 in 100 more accurately 1 in 10000. She was born with a rare Congenital Heart Defect {CHD}. Called Truncus Arteriosus or TA for sake of brevity. TA's main thing is the two main arteries going into the heart are fused together and never seperated at birth. It's bad news. There is no cure for this kind of thing. Simply repairs that happen over the course of life.

So here is me. Desperately trying to find a way to get the word about this and the 40 other types of CHD out there in the world. I thought. "What if I make a game..." Not based around the medical jargon but on a level people could understand. I spent the better part of the last six years attending appointments with her and still don't get it. What I do get is her Emotional state. How her CHD causes her to think and feel.

So here is the pitch.

The game is about a girl who is diagnosed at birth with a CHD. She is now in her 20's and has to undergo an open heart surgery to repair the defect. The day comes. She goes under but when she wakes up she find herself in a final fantasy style environment. This new world has a darkness cast over it. She is unknowingly the hero of this world and she has to face off with multiple bosses of varied degrees of evil.

Then after beating these bosses she really wakes up from the surgery. Waking up to the realization that the world she saved was herself. And all the bosses were manifestations of her own internal feelings. Depression, anxiety, hopelessness, Denise, desire and so on.

I would sell this game with the caveat that 2/3 of all profits get split between the Adult Congenital Heart Association and Project Heart. As those are the two main organizations that deal heavily with creating standards of care and raising awareness for CHD survivors.

Thoughts?

Note: I am still learning game dev. This is an eventual goal for me.

Why should you sing RAID controllers a soothing song before turning off the lights?

They're afRAID of the dark.