PROTIP: Using ed(1) can be a fun experience. Just remember to RTFM and be patient.
Using a cheesy amber CRT helps, as well.

Drawing might not be inherently software-related, but this particular sketch IS software-related. Additionally, the depicted character looks a bit pissed. As such, posting this thing to devRant SHOULD be all right.

Of course, "random" is a stupid term; this post is at best pseudorandom. Every man who is worth a highland midge's urine sample knows that KOOL KEITH is the one true source of entropy.

Actually managing to draw a decent-looking three-quarters pose demands a celebratory ginger ale!

This drawing or a relatively refined equivalent should eventually be used as an image on the 5XX error pages of VARIK's Web servers.

Detailed criticism is welcomed -- not knowing that stuff sucks sucks.

The lack of a standard APL logo is a damn shame. Luckily, the light bulb is handsome and recognisable for APL hackers.

Reading "duh... that link looks sketchy" time after time when attempting to nudge people in the direction of good resources, e.g., on-line manual pages, becomes rather irritating. Is typing the URL into VirusTotal or something really such a fucking hassle? Are you sufficiently special to warrant the creation of an IP grabber which is dedicated to targeting you... AFTER you posted your exact location on Instagram last week?

Similarly, some pants-shitting, worm-eating troglodytes who have the gall to claim to know anything about cybersecurity STILL think that for all Web sites k, that k's URL begins with "https" implies that k is secure. NO! Unencrypted Web sites are FINE unless sensitive information is being transferred. Are publicly available manual pages sensitive information now?

Grabbing the campaign hat and writing death threats and very personal insults is sometimes slightly tempting.

Machine learning is fine IFF MACHINE LEARNING IS USED APPROPRIATELY.

One disadvantage of being an intelligence analyst is hearing the same shitty "how smart am I?" joke over and over and over and over and...over and over and over and...over again.

One advantage of being reasonably proficient with Haskell is being able to very quickly create maintainable programs, often without needing to write extensive documentation.

One disadvantage of having Haskell as a favourite programming language is sometimes looking like a pretentious ass.
But just read the type definition and think for once, idiot. How could "Monad m => (a1 -> a2 -> a3 -> a4 -> r) -> m a1 -> m a2 -> m a3 -> m a4 -> m r" confuse even a beginner to computer programming, nonetheless Haskell?

Courier and Computer Modern are God's typefaces.

Everyone can enjoy a vacation day.

For all things, for all men, that a man compliments a thing does not imply that this man at least attempts to understand this thing. However, for all men, that a man criticises a thing implies that this man at least attempts to understand this thing.

For all computer programs, that a computer program is terrible implies that scrapping the current implementation of this computer program and beginning anew may be the best method of fixing this computer program.

With few exceptions, for all programming languages $l$, given sufficient effort, $l$ source code can be human-readable.

The UNIX philosophy never became outdated.

For all computer programs $p$, $p$ should be written sufficiently well that the author of $p$ can be prideful of $p$.

For all computer programs $p$, a specification for $p$ should be written before $p$ is created.

For all good computer programs, a good computer program can run on terrible hardware.

Every clock cycle is valuable.

In the spirit of Thanksgiving, to @dfox, @trogus: Thanks for creating a social media Web site which is actually tolerable, possibly even good. To the other users of this Web site: Thanks for not fucking up this actually-tolerable social media Web site.
Keep up the good work.

On a different note, _Deus Ex_ is by far my favourite video game. However, OpenBSD, which is my favourite operating system, does not support playing _Deus Ex_; as such, I was forced to improvise.
I own a few servers which run Ubuntu Linux, which can run VirtualBox, which can run Microsoft Windows XP, which can play _Deus Ex_. As such, I relocated my copy of Windows XP and spun up a new virtual machine, installing the operating system and the video game. After some minor hiccups, _Deus Ex_ was played without any difficulties, aside from the lack of audio, which resulted from having used VNC to access the virtual machine.
This set-up is janky, for I access the game by connecting via VNC to an Ubuntu installation which runs a virtual installation of Microsoft Windows... which runs _Deus Ex_ in windowed mode; however, I find that using this janky set-up is preferable to not being able to play _Deus Ex_.

On an even _more_ different note, future rants may be written in the third person; possibly as a result of having written briefings and whatnot in the third person for nearly two (2) decades and disliking pronouns, I dislike writing in the first person. I shall still be the author of the rants which are posted to this account.

Must nearly every recently-made piece of software be terrible?

Firefox runs terribly slowly on a four-core 1.6GHz processor when given eight (8) gigabytes of RAM. Discord's user interface is awfully slow and uses unnecessary animations. Google's stuff is just falling apart; a toaster notification regarding MRO stock was recently pushed such that some markup elements of this notification were visible in the notification, the download links which are generated by Google Drive have sometimes returned error 404, and Google's software is overall sluggish and somewhat unstable. Today, an Android phone failed to update the Google Drive application... and failed to return a meaningful error message. Comprehensive manuals appear to be increasingly often not provided. Microsoft began to digest Windows after Windows XP was released.

Laziness is not virtuous.

For all computer programs, a computer program should be written such that this computer program performs well on reasonably terrible hardware... and kept simple. The UNIX philosophy is woefully underappreciated.

I created a Discord server which is focused on OpenBSD and thought that some of you might like to be some of the first -- or only -- members of this Discord server.
Suggestions for server improvements from those who do join would be appreciated.

One can join the Discord server by visiting http://discord.gg/zeGDz5.

I recently managed to accidentally delete the entirety of a personal C++ project on which had been working for a couple of days; after attempting to create an archive without tarballing the folder, I noticed that the files had been compressed individually, which was not the desired output. After running <code>rm *.gz</code>, I realised that I had forgotten to specify that the original files should be kept; as a result of this, I had accidentally deleted every project file. Instead of kicking the shit out of my table and forcing myself to spend money on new equipment, I understood that this was entirely my fault and could be prevented in the future. Luckily, I managed to recreate the entirety of the project in less than an hour, and it runs nicely.
_Remember to make back-ups._

On a different note, as if to prove that the majority of recent software is worthless, the recent Firefox update runs like AIDS on my machine (i5-2520M + 8GB DDR4). Fix your shit, Mozilla. This is inexcusable.

I feel that I should mention my reason for having joined devRant.

Although I often write computer programs, I do not consider myself to be a computer programmer, for the problems which I solve often do not pertain to the method which I use to solve a problem with a computer program. Rather, I am an intelligence analyst, and this has been my title for approximately sixteen (16) years.

I joined devRant not only because I wished to better the computer programs which I write, although this could be better accomplished by again reading the specifications for the programming languages which I use, but also because I wished to join an on-line community of which the members are interesting and competent. As I read threads, I observe that both of these requirements have been matched, with the emphasis being placed on the latter requirement.

I thank the majority of you for maintaining an on-line community which is not (total) crap. Ha.

I have previously posted something which is similar to this post; however, the amount of relevant information which is provided within this post will hopefully exceed the amount of relevant information which was provided in the mentioned post.

If my skill set, which is visible at http://gyazo.com/d27a11ec203579178c..., interests you, then I request that you contact me at varikvalefor@aol.com, for I am searching for a new correspondent.

Because some individuals have misinterpreted the previous text, I state that I shall continue to hold the position which I have held for the past sixteen-something years; I am merely searching for a personal contact.

Attached to this post should be a photograph which features one of my workspaces, in addition to some JPEG compression artefacts.

That a man owns a fully-rugged notebook computer does not imply that this man should hold the computer by its screen.

A couple of days ago, an individual attempted to convince me that the National Security Agency is capable of cracking Rijndael encryption; as a response, I informed the individual of the infeasible nature of the factoring of extremely large semiprimes; however, my attempts were futile, as the individual believes that NSA possesses sufficient power to crack this encryption without intercepting the transmission of the corresponding private key.
The Dunning-Kruger effect is real; although this individual tends to be logically-minded, there does exist an exception to this good behaviour.

"It is easier to square a circle than get 'round a mathematician."

“A computer language is not just a way of getting a computer to perform operations but rather that it is a novel formal medium for expressing ideas about methodology. Thus, programs must be written for people to read, and only incidentally for machines [including the human] to execute.” (The Structure and Interpretation of a Computer Programs, 1985)

“If you try to make something beautiful, it is often ugly. If you try to make something useful, it is often beautiful.” -Mr. OSCAR WILDE

Unless you are an analyst who deals with a lot of information*, your relatively simple computer programs should not require hundreds of megabytes of RAM. For the love of God, please remember this.

*“Big data” sounds stupid.

I am again utilising flowcharts for the structuring of my computer programs and strongly recommend to all of you similar behaviour; this facilitates the process of programming, because new tasks can be easily added and removed, and errors can be quickly spotted.

Python is an example of a language which is far, far too high-level for my liking; to provide a reference for my preference, C++ is one of my favourite languages, because it is versatile while remaining somewhat verbose, while Python tosses that verbosity out of the window while not functioning as one would expect it to function after reading a lot of the documentation.

Being a Varikist is encountering in the same document one's own previously-written useless functions, which span across multiple lines, in addition to functions which only operate properly because the planets have aligned in something akin to an elliptic curve; these are not indecipherable because the program entirely lacks comments, but because the comments pertain to a program which is somewhat different from that which one wishes to understand.
An example of this is “if senderOfMessage != regexpressiona...senderOfMessage = regexpressiona”; I am wholely uncertain of my reason for having written the program in this manner, but I will not be changing it, because my programs can be diplomatically described as having been developed with a utilitarian approach; they merely need to be functional, and, as such, a lot of repositioning is used during the development process. Of course, for the programs which I write for occupational reasons, I create flowcharts before beginning work on the program, and I imagine that the adoption of this habit for personal projects would likely not kill me.

People who don't like mathematics have never actually studied the subject.

Do people often misinterpret your sarcasm as being genuine maliciousness? This somewhat frequently happens to me.

Man, time just flies for me now. I must be aging. Ha.

I originally played System Shock in 1994, and I remember being rather frightened by it, but I didn't complete it. I decided to give it another go, and it still creeps me the hell out, but I didn't make a mistake by reinstalling it; I quite enjoy it -- it's up there with Quarantine. Deus Ex is still my favourite, though.

People have described me as being paranoid. I prefer “sufficiently cautious”.

I continue to firmly believe that psychological abuse can in the long run create incredibly strong and confident people, that those who become depressed as a result of being abused simply haven't developed the ability to use everything for the better, and that bullying can encourage the psychologically-abused to use everything for the better.

Oh, dang. I've been described as being a boomer.