Fully 80% of the time I spend doing mathematics is chasing sign errors.

Yay for technical debt.

For each bug I attempt to fix, I am finding > 1.0 more bugs that are related to it that also need fixing, leading to exponential bug discovery.

So, summer in a 'minergie' building. Pseudo-air conditioning means it is a bit cooler inside, if you win the office lottery, but the humidity is not controlled at all.

Next week, the dew point will not drop below 17 degrees, and I may die.

Generally, I like to do it in the dark, or in the shower.
Doing it at work can be awkward, what with everyone watching.

Shared home directory, different architectures, and fucking python pip.

Python allows a site-wide architecture-dependent directory, but PEP 370 presumes all the world's a vax. Or whatever machine you happen to be using at the time.

Did people look at autoconf's --exec-prefix and think, who would ever use that? So sick of software reanimating bad design decisions that were put to rest thirty years ago.

If I have to deal with one more package dependency today that doesn't have any support for configuring with an exec_prefix, I will likely do something that somebody else will regret.

Business consultants armed with psychometric pseudoscience have invaded our organisation.

I fear it is only a matter of time before HR strays yet further from any sort of rationality, basing their decisions on some sort of essentialist colour type stereotype nonsense.

Anyone successfully dealt with these sorts of infestations before?

Somehow balance work, self-education, exercise, sleep, and non-work activities. This year for sure. [1]

[1] And reduce number of footnotes in rants.

On those rare occasions where I am on long enough break with few enough obligations: working on Project Euler problems for fun.

Or on one of a multitude of incomplete side projects.

I have a great job, working on interesting projects with good, competent people.

But sharing an office is slowly driving me insane.

Oops, falling off the wrong side of the Ballmer Peak.

I need to post a laziest thing, because I sodding mistagged a completely unrelated rant.

About 20 years ago (!) we needed a couple of big primes to set up asymmetric encryption for some sort of verification/signing whatsit in this game we were developing. How do you generate big primes?

Well, there was this fairly new thing called openssl, which was open source, and _it_ had to have the facility to find large primes for RSA key generation. Half an hour of hacking at the openssl source code gave us a prime generator, saving us from writing one from first principles.

For context, our high score security consisted of simply xoring the data with a secret. The secret was one byte long.

Fucking smokers at bus stops.

Forced to breathe your vile, clothes infusing emissions because you can't wait and you don't fucking care about anyone else.

A pox on you.

Every time I hear the word 'exascale' I find it harder not to snirk.

Writing an NFA-based matcher for glob functionality: fun!

Writing the actual glob function, mock filesystem representation for testing, tests: questioning will to live.

Paper feedback full of criticisms of English usage and constructions that are entirely correct and idiomatic. If English is not your first language, and you are reviewing a paper, please have someone check your corrections!

CMake. include(<FOO>) has different behaviour if <FOO> is a 'file' or a 'module'. There is no option to include that says if something is a file or a module.

How does CMake know if <FOO> is a file or a module? What even is a module anyhow? Who knows? The documentation doesn't!

I can't get any recent information about computational steering frameworks, because all their names have since been reused by bands and music services.

Boost python, CMake, Python 2 and 3, and python module installation.

A perfect confluence of poop.

Morning people get to set the rules.
That is all.

TFW when you discover you're the largest contributor to a project... as measured by line deletions. 😎

CMake. Because as always, it's even worse that it looks.

1. There is a nearly-undocumented variable for determining the permissions for implicitly created directories in the install path.

2. This variable is used for install(TARGET), install(FILES), but not for install(DIRECTORY). Why? Because fuck me I have no idea.

I can't even imagine how they could have implemented this functionality and yet have this behaviour. Unless it was written by Koppipasta the drunken lemur intern.

Don't accept merge requests from drunken lemurs. Just say no.

CMake: INSTALL creates a directory? Use umask. INSTALL copies a file? Ignore umask.

WTF you muppets?!

CMake. Two different ways to find package. Same command. Different search paths.

CMake. Install an export? Generate 17 different CMake scripts. Which can't be found unless they are put in the right path, *which is system fucking dependent*.

CMake. Export was installed? The import library is not global, so it cannot be aliased. WTF? WTAFF?!

CMake. Package not found. Okay add it as an external project. But you can't now find it again unless you refucking run fucking CMake again.

CMake. Debugging an external project problem? Well, just wipe the build and start again, because ~~ Mysterious State ~~. Even if that means rebuilding everything else.

CMake. Where even the documentation for "if" makes no sense.

Who are these deranged monkeys? Who gave them jobs? Why do people use their flung poop of a build system?

CMake.

Literally the only thing I use regularly that makes me want to
-DUSE_CAPSLOCK_KEY=FUCKING_ON

Today's instalment in unsigned rage: a next-power-of-2 function that loops forever on half the domain of unsigned.

When I finally snap, and am brought to justice after a coding-induced rampage, they will ask me why: why did I kill all those programmers? And all I will say, is modulo two to the k.

"Success! One more step to go. Please restart your computer before you start Visual Studio Community 2017."

Why the ... what the flying ... what the fuck did you install that requires a fucking reboot? Did you install the compiler in my fucking graphics driver for accelerated build times? What year is this, and why does Windows want to reboot like a fucking superhero franchise?!

Deep breaths.

cudaFooBar() returns cudaError_t, which is a typedef of enum cuda_error, but not a typedef of enum cudaError_enum, which is returned by cuWombleBaz().

Unsigned type means mod 2^n. It's not rocket science, argh!

Context: colleagues surprised by/demand comments for code like: static constexpr unsigned max_value = -1;

Recommended alternative: static constexpr unsigned max_value = std::numeric_limits<unsigned>::max();

Which will work great until someone carelessly increases the width of max_value to size_t or somesuch.