Gonna give up on Advent of code.
I know I'm not really a programmer and while I had fun solving the challenges so far it feels I fail to translate the idea of solution into working code. i.e. I know how it should be working, but when diving into the code I'm losing focus and getting lost in the functionality.
It was also good reality check of my skill level when a task took me 50 min while TOP100 is below 10. Can't really fit the time it takes me to come up with a solution with other activities I should actually be doing.

"Try Ubuntu Pro beta with a free personal subscription on up to 5 machines.
Learn more at https://ubuntu.c...."

....subscription ads in "apt upgrade" ... WHAT THE F

Our company has internal webpage to request software, be it freeware or licensed.
Today, I found there "Software engineering bundle" designated for "software developers and data scientists who require advanced compute and data processing tools".
The software bundle contains PuTTY, 7-zip and Notepad++.

TIL: new M2 MacBooks officially support only single external screen. Not even the Pro class supports dual. It supports single 6K monitor, but I've failed to find any userfriendly ways to get good tiling which would be equivalent to multi-monitor. The only native tilling is left/right split. TB3 can handle 3x2K or 2x4K, but Apple said "fuck you and your multi-monitor setup".
I ain't mad tho. The guy upgrading to M2 sold me his dual monitors for a really good price.

I spent a few days being mean to my LMDE4 and newly installed LMDE5 and Debian in past months. Every time I needed to run something small&simple under linux, it was acting up. Traces, botched boots, OS freezing up...
The issue was in VirtualBox the whole time and recent update finally fixed it.
Sorry for blaming you Tux

Douglas Crockford: "The best thing we can do today to JavaScript is to retire it."

https://evrone.com/douglas-crockfor...

I just found out i've wasted month of my life by troubleshooting wrong component.
I was unable to access my application in cluster and suspected networking and port configuration. (custom corporate setup with chaotic documentation did not help to situation)
In the end, it was caused by Jenkins, which failed on building a new container but still showed "build: success" while it deployed May version of container without any changes applied.

Do not offer anyone to help them with their scripts, ever.
I had to do something as there were things like "cd $DIR; rm *". No checks if the folder got changed, no qutoes to prevent breaking on spaces. A problem waiting to happen. And it did. We don't know what the script deleted in the wrong folder to this day.
The scripts have no functions, some files have over 50% duplicate code. I was an idiot and thought running it through shellcheck and doing basic prevention of them shooting their own foot would be enough.
And there is no way to convince the guy to start writing the code properly. Should have kept my mouth shut.

Let's say you have a MySQL database table for jobs. Each job has 1 associated ticket. You want to keep track if the ticket is closed or not. Every sane person creates jobs table, tickets table, keeps bool value for ticket state and relationship between them.

But because our database is designed by a half braindead amoeba, we have one table only, so each job has to be updated individually with a new ticket number and its state. Beacuse it sooo much faster to update (daily!) 13k jobs than just 100 tickets.
As a bonus - if the ticked is closed, the column "ticket_closed" is "No", if it's still open the value is "FALSE". Yes, both as varchar/strings.

Corporations... huge, old, monolithic
We want you to automate but will do everything we can to prevent you from getting resources to do it. Restricting policies, decisions by managers on "what they do not want". No procedures on how to achieve the result within policies. Half the business lives in a gray zone and sea of policy exceptions.
We finally decided to get at least Azure subscription instead of trying to develop similar framework internally, but wE DoNT WANt YOu to dEPlOY thERE As WE Don't cOnSIDEr it sAfE ENough.
Like pissing against wind.

Software packages can be installed only through proprietary software manager on a corporate server to ensure auditability and compliance.
The package manager fails, because it attempts to execute `yum` on an Ubuntu server.

How do you define a seniority in a corporate is beyond me.
This guy is supposed to be Tier3, literally "advanced technical support". Taking care of network boxes, which are more or less linux servers. The most knowledgable person on the topic, when Tier1 screws something and it's not BAU/Tier2 can't fix it.
In the past hour he:
- attempted to 'cd' to a file and wondered why he got an error
- has no idea how to spell 'md5sum'
- syntax for 'cp' command had to be spelled out to him letter by letter
- has only vague idea how SSH key setup works (can do it only if sombody prepares him the commands)
- was confused how to 'grep' a string from a logfile

This is not something new and fancy he had no time to learn yet. These things are the same past 20-30 years. I used to feel sorry for US guys getting fired due to their work being outsourced to us but that is no longer the case. Our average IT college drop-out could handle maintenance better than some of these people.

I despise whovere come up with VBA IDE. Why is all the code confined within one window when multimonitor setups existed even back in the 14'' CRT era? And what sort of a fuckhead thought it's a good idea to throw a pop-up (with a notification sound!) every time you want to move from partially written line to a different one?

But hey, I managed to optimise the data parsing from 97 down to 3 sec.

Is there a way to display list of all weeklies outside of the devRant app, ie in any web browser?

There has been quite a lot of interesting weekly topics, but going through them on the phone is a pain.

Project with a single developer. Main automation used daily by 50% of the team past few years.
...
git server setup? done
hands on workshops? done
invited to ask more questions/for assistance? yes
....1 month later....
Q: Why haven't you pushed your code to the repo? Did you encountered any issues?
A: Why it has to be in the repo when the source code is available on my computer and I copy it into shared folder from time to time?

Everything is set up and was served on a silver plate. I would even assist with the commits before they get used to using it. More than half a year have passed. Yet the source codes are nowhere to be found.

Why is everybody using "wpa_passphrase" instead of "psk" in wpa_supplicant.conf is beyond me. You have an option to avoid plaintext passwords, the wpa_passphrase CLI tool even generates an entry for suppliant configuration, yet it seems nobody is using it.

Decided to get myself a new phone as the 2013 model is getting morally obsolete. I can still flash Lineage/Android10 and it will run it. But the apps (e.g. Google Maps) nowadays are such a performance hog it can't cope.
So I've searched through gsmarena, prioritizing smaller phones, picked myself a candidate and had it on my desk after few days.
The 2013 mindset still the same "do the backup before touching the phone in any way". How do you do backup? Unlock bootloader, boot/flash TWRP, run backup.
I've realized only after the unlocking and some googling, that the unlock automatically deletes TA partition and stored DRM keys. So advanced licensed features of the phone are gone. Also there is no way to lock the bootloader again, so I've lost the SafetyNet validation too.

tl;dr: I've fucked up my new phone as a first step after I got it.

You want to change the wifi network to which is your embedded device connected?
It's easy:
- The native process is broken
- ESP is in the correct state, but refuse to communicate with anything
- Restore to default doesn't work
- Flashing default firmware doesn't help
- download the whole NodeJS/NPM
- compile two perl binaries
- bump into 2 year old bug, that your Intel wifi won't connect to the ESP SoftAP
- reinstall the Intel driver, just to find out it's still not fixed
- connect the external Atheros wifi adapter
- connect that shit back to the cloud

And just after little under 4 days of fiddling with GPIO pins it finally works and communicates.

Management is preparing overview/standup session, to get everybody in sync about what is currently ongoing across the team while we are isolated.
SMEs agreed each topic should not be too detailed and 10-15 min (average attention span lmit) otherwise people will lose focus.
Management outcome? "Let's include an 1 hour deepdive session on [incredible complex and monotone subject]".
Maybe the audio quality wouldn't be so bad if they wouldn't have their heads up their asses.

Decided to install new CentOS to prepare for Red Hat exams.
a) had to disable VirtualBox Audio and USB otherwise it got stuck during boot (lvm2 masking did not help)
b) First command - "dnf update". Crashed in middle of the process and completely screwed dnf/yum (TWICE!). Went through just fine when executed from runlevel 3.

So far it held up to the name Enterprise Linux because this is the exact out of box clusterfuck I would expect from a corporate.

DAYLIGHT SAVING!!
Up to this point, I was indifferent to the issue if it should be kept or not. My sleep schedule is fucked and non-routine anyway so one hour plus or minus doesn't play any role.
I got to a meeting scheduling problem, when I have 2 timestamps in variable timezones and want to calculate time difference. Both can have DST active. There is no algortihmic way to figure out. I checked SO and pytz and it's just a list of hardcoded dates when DST starts and ends. WHATHTEHELL.jpg
Not only we should abolish the DST, we should force the whole world into UTC/Zulu. And those, who refuse to adapt to UTC, will be forced to work with plain integer epoch dates.

Hardware of laptops today.
Displays: Glossy screens everywhere. "Hurr durr it has better colors". Idgaf what colors it has, when the only thing I can see is the wall behind me and my own reflection. Make it matte or get it out.
Touchpads: Bring back mechanical buttons. Haptic feedback dying with touchscreens/surfaces is a tragedy. "But we can have bigger touchpad area without buttons" ...why? the goal shouldn't be 1:1 touchpad vs. display ratio. It ain't a bloody tablet.
Docking stations: Some bright fucker figured out that they can utilize USB C. That thing keeps falling out with slightest laptop movement disconnecting all peripherals (guess why microUSB had those small hooks?). Also it doesn't have sufficient throughput, so the 5 years old dock can feed 3 full HD monitors just fine and the new one can't.
Keyboards: Personally I hate chiclet. And it's everywhere, because "apple has it so we must too". But the thing I hate even more is retardation of the arrow keys (up and down merged into size of one key), missing dedicated Home/End/PgDwn/PgUp buttons and somebody deciding the F keys are not needed and started replacing them with some multimedia bullshit.

My overall feeling is that this happens when you give the market to designers and customer demand. You end up with eye candy and useless fancy gadgets, with lowered ergonomy and worse features than previous generations of the same hardware. My laptop dying is my daily nightmare as I have no idea with what on the current market I would replace it.

And you can only hope you don't have to compile it yourself using alternate sources.

"Microsoft Excel interprets a blank cell as zero, and not as empty or blank."

blank != blank

official: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us...
Thanks MS

Compliance trainings.
All that mandatory bullshit, where they're trying to take the most boring thing ever (ie policies), and gamify it, throw shitload of multimedia on it, make it interactive and think anybody is going to care.
I don't want to watch your fucking videos where employees are trying to enact policy violations.
I'm not going to follow the policies and cooperate with HR as they're not to be trusted in a first place.

Where the hell is the "skip bullshit" button, which takes me to the end of the training, where I click the "I Acknowledge" button, because agreement/liability confirmation is the only thing they're after anyway.

RFC for 700 HTTP Status Codes
https://github.com/joho/7XX-rfc
o 703 - Explosion
o 728 - It works in my timezone
o 732 - Fucking Unic💩de
o 791 - The Internet shut down due to copyright restrictions
o 797 - This is the last page of the Internet. Go back