!rant

Just wanted to congratulate @JS96 on devRant V2 UWP app. Can tell he put blood and sweat into this app and it sure as hell has paid off.

Thank you.

Damn Dijkstra!

A few years ago when I was still an apple fan boy, friend of mine bragging me about how android is awesome, we were drinking some shots at our local pub and I was starting to get light headed. At one point he showed me so called "terminal emulator" app. I checked it out, and assumed it's an emulation, just like dosbox, so I decided to verify that "rm -rf *"... (the phone was rooted)

The phone shutdown within seconds, I couldn't stop laughing, while my friend was shock that his new phone was longer booting.

Luckily he managed to reflash the ROM. What can I learn from that experience?
1. Don't drink and sudo
2. Don't call your app an emulator if it's the real deal.

I don't havey Friends , but the ones I have know me inside out.

I turned 18 yesterday , and what did I get for a gift , a literal 5 page C++ Program that my pals lovingly wrote for me. Compiling it right now. Let's see what it's got for me.

*Now that's what I call a Hacker*

MOTHER OF ALL AUTOMATIONS

This seems a long post. but you will definitely +1 the post after reading this.

xxx: OK, so, our build engineer has left for another company. The dude was literally living inside the terminal. You know, that type of a guy who loves Vim, creates diagrams in Dot and writes wiki-posts in Markdown... If something - anything - requires more than 90 seconds of his time, he writes a script to automate that.

xxx: So we're sitting here, looking through his, uhm, "legacy"

xxx: You're gonna love this

xxx: smack-my-bitch-up.sh - sends a text message "late at work" to his wife (apparently). Automatically picks reasons from an array of strings, randomly. Runs inside a cron-job. The job fires if there are active SSH-sessions on the server after 9pm with his login.

xxx: kumar-asshole.sh - scans the inbox for emails from "Kumar" (a DBA at our clients). Looks for keywords like "help", "trouble", "sorry" etc. If keywords are found - the script SSHes into the clients server and rolls back the staging database to the latest backup. Then sends a reply "no worries mate, be careful next time".

xxx: hangover.sh - another cron-job that is set to specific dates. Sends automated emails like "not feeling well/gonna work from home" etc. Adds a random "reason" from another predefined array of strings. Fires if there are no interactive sessions on the server at 8:45am.

xxx: (and the oscar goes to) fuckingcoffee.sh - this one waits exactly 17 seconds (!), then opens an SSH session to our coffee-machine (we had no frikin idea the coffee machine is on the network, runs linux and has SSHD up and running) and sends some weird gibberish to it. Looks binary. Turns out this thing starts brewing a mid-sized half-caf latte and waits another 24 (!) seconds before pouring it into a cup. The timing is exactly how long it takes to walk to the machine from the dudes desk.

xxx: holy sh*t I'm keeping those

Credit: http://bit.ly/1jcTuTT

The bash scripts weren't bogus, you can find his scripts on the this github URL:
https://github.com/narkoz/...

Update - The 'devRant trans-oceanic 21st century message in a bottle' community project is progressing nicely.

There is terrific research being done by the team in a slack channel. It is a great fun learning experience.

We have taken the 2000 year old message in a bottle concept and are breaking new ground leveraging very cool technology. We are still in phase 1 but at a high level devRant's much coveted stress ball will cross the Atlantic Ocean in a bottle type encasing.

We will use satellite tracking and gps to track devie throughout the journey. We will use Arduino or a similar microprocessor. We may use sensors and gyros to monitor the surrounding environment for temperature and depth.
We are also studying ocean currents, shipping lanes, weather data and bottle materials to make the journey as smooth as possible.

This is an official devRant sponsored project. We encourage you and any dev friends to join the conversation. Below is a link to the original rant which has the Slack channel info.

The sun never sets on devRant and we love intriguing projects!

https://www.devrant.io/rants/303014

Pain the ass sales guy walks into my office uninvited. Looks at one of my screens which has sftp copying a lot of files and spewing out each one. He asks what that "nonsense" is.

I politely tell him that it is all his sales data and I am deleting it. At which point I got up and went to lunch with no further discussion.

The next phone call I received was from my boss asking me to stop fucking with the sales people. I hope he learned to knock after this.

Loved the first project at the university. Your game had to load a map from txt file and create a labirynth with a player inside. It shoud include a bird's eye view and FPS-like - all using only console characters. There were some bonus points - for example for animation or built-in map editor. (language was C)

We now have a devRant telegram group!

Please click this link to join:

https://telegram.me/joinchat/...

The learning curve for programming is more like steps than a curve.

Really tall steps.

And they go on forever.

Eventually you die. Leaving your body as a landmark for those who come after you. Unless you're completely useless. Then your body just ends up at the bottom of a gully.

The point is don't give up. Don't die in a gully. Each dead end is a wall to clime. Every plateau is just the path to the next step.