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So today I found out I'm a Senior Developer. Was I told nope. Just found it on my contact details on the company address book. Ask boss about it he said yes I am. Would have been nice to have been told I was promoted...8
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When I was 10 years old, all kids at my school got access to school emails. The email address book contained everything in my city, like fire department, all pupils of all schools etc. So I decided to "test" the system by sending out a mass email to everyone in the address book (about 3k) with the question "Hi, how are you?".
The sys admins apparently didn't think very far as I got some responses saying like "You have crashed a server in the capital city" and "I have contacted your local IT admin".
So I went to the IT admin and told him the situation. His face turned red of anger and I remember him almost screaming at me.
Who the fuck doesn't set up protection for this and gives out access to 10 year olds? This was 15 years ago, I really hope sys admins are smarter today!6 -
What is a pointer?
A descriptive and ELI5 answer found on Reddit:
You have a house.
When you’re outside, and you want to go home, you don’t make another house right where you are, because it’s too big for you to carry around or take apart.
So you carry a piece of paper or store on your phone the address of your house. Now you always know exactly how to find your house so that you can go home.
The piece of paper or your phone is a variable.
The variable contains an address (a reference) to your house.
You can make a copy of this piece of paper and hand it out to your friends when you invite them over, instead of building each friend a copy of your house.
You can have an address book filled with pages, where each page is an address (i.e., an array of pointers). Each page you turn (each index you increment) goes to the directly next address-containing variable.
Now if you cut the address book in half along its height, and then attach the lower half behind the upper half, then you have a book with smaller pages but more pages.
You can store phone numbers in this, and even if it’s the same total size, you have double the number of pages and double the number of phone numbers (if you store one number on each page).
Now, since the pointers to home-addresses are different from pointers to phone-numbers, turning the page in an address book (increment pointer by 1) moves forward by one address.
But turning the page in the phone book (incrementing pointer by 1) leads you to the next phone number, even if you technically turned only “half a page”.
That’s how pointer arithmetic works.
Source: https://reddit.com/r/...8 -
I find it so infuriating when someone uploads a lot of data containing other people's data as well without asking those people if that's alright with them. (Contact information, address book, etc).
That you don't care about that/privacy is your choice, even your goddamn right but then please don't take other peoples right to privacy/their own choice away in the fucking process.5 -
You know what really grinds my gears? As a junior webdeveloper (mostly backend) I try my hardest to deliver quality content and other people's ignorance is killing me in my current job.
Let's rant about a recent project I had under my hood, for this project (a webshop) I had to restructure the database and had to include validation on basicly every field (what the heck, no validation I hear you say??), apperently they let an incompetent INTERN make this f***king webshop. The list of mistakes in this project can bring you close to the moon I'd say, seriously.
Database design 101 is basicly auto incremented ID's, and using IDs in general instead of using name (among a list of other stuff obv.). Well, this intern decided it was a good idea to filter a custom address-book module based on a NAME, so it wasn't setup as: /addressbook/{id} (unique ID, never a problem) but as /addressbook/{name}, which results in only showing one address if the first names on the addresses are the same. Lots of bugs that go by this type of incompetence and ignorance. Want to hear another joke? Look no further, this guy also decided it was a great idea to generate the next ID of an order. So the ordernumber wasn't made up by the auto incremented id on the order model, but by a count of all the orders and that was the next order number. This broke so many times, unbelievable.
To close the list of mistakes off, the intern decided it was a great idea to couple the address of a user directly to an order. Because the user is able to ship stuff to addresses within his addressbook, this bug could delete whole orders out of the system by simply deleting the address in your addressbook.
Enough about my intern rant, after working my ass of and going above and beyond the expectations of the customer, the guy from sales who was responsible for it showed what an a**hole he was. Lets call this guy Tom.
Little backstory: our department is a very small part of the company but we are responsible for so much if you think about it. The company thinks we've transitioned to company wide SCRUM, but in reality we are so far from it. I think the story below is a great example of what causes this.
Anyway, we as the web department work within Gitlab. All of our issues and sprints are organized and updated within this place. The rest of the company works with FileMaker, such a pile of shit software but I've managed to work around its buggyness. Anyway, When I was done with the project described above I notified all the stakeholders, this includes Tom. I made a write-up of all the changes I had made to the project, including screenshots and examples, within Gitlab. I asked for feedback and made sure to tag Tom so he was notified of my changes to the project.
After hearing nothing for 2 weeks, guess who came to my desk yesterday? F**king tom asking what had changed during my time on the project. I told him politely to check Gitlab and said on a friendly tone that I had notified him over 2 weeks ago. He, I shit you not, blantly told me that he never looks on there "because of all the notifications" and that I should 'tell him what to do' within FileMaker (which I already had updated referencing Gitlab with the write-up of my changes). That dick move of him made me lose all respect for this guy, what an ignorant piece of shit he is afterall.
The thing that triggers me the most in the last story is that I spent so much free time to perfect the project I was working on (the webshop). I even completed some features which weren't scheduled during the sprint I was working on, and all I was asking for was a little appreciation and feedback. Instead, he showed me how ignorant and what a dick he was.
I absolutely have no reason to keep on working for this company if co-workers keep treating me like this. The code base of the webshop is now in a way better condition, but there are a dozen other projects like this one. And guess what? All writen by the same intern.
/rant :P10 -
My step mother told me she has an old laptop from which she wanted to extract the email address book. I highly doubt of them (less than 20) are still up to date. Some of them are from dead ISPs 😰
I'm honestly surprised about the immediate respond times and that it still works pretty well.
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I really enjoy my old Kindle Touch rather than reading long pdf's on a tablet or desktop. The Kindle is much easier on my eyes plus some of my pdf's are critical documents needed to recover business processes and systems. During a power outage a tablet might only last a couple of days even with backup power supplies, whereas my Kindle is good for at least 2 weeks of strong use.
Ok, to get a pdf on a Kindle is simple - just email the document to your Kindle email address listed in your Amazon –Settings – Digital Content – Devices - Email. It will be <<something>>@kindle.com.
But there is a major usability problem reading pdf's on a Kindle. The font size is super tiny and you do not have font control as you do with a .MOBI (Kindle) file. You can enlarge the document but the formatting will be off the small Kindle screen. Many people just advise to not read pdf's on a Kindle. devRanters never give up and fortunately there are some really cool solutions to make pdf's verrrrry readable and enjoyable on a Kindle
There are a few cloud pdf- to-.MOBI conversion solutions but I had no intention of using a third party site my security sensitive business content. Also, in my testing of sample pdf's the formatting of the .MOBI file was good but certainly not great.
So here are a couple option I discovered that I find useful:
Solution 1) Very easy. Simply email the pdf file to your Kindle and put 'convert' in the subject line. Amazon will convert the pdf to .MOBI and queue it up to synch the next time you are on wireless. The final e-book .MOBI version of the pdf is readable and has all of the .MOBI options available to you including the ability for you to resize fonts and maintain document flow to properly fit the Kindle screen. Unfortunately, for my requirements it did not measure-up to Solution 2 below which I found much more powerful.
Solution 2) Very Powerful. This solution takes under a minute to convert a pdf to .MOBI and the small effort provides incredible benefits to fine tune the final .MOBI book. You can even brand it with your company information and add custom search tags. In addition, it can be used for many additional input and output files including ePub which is used by many other e-reader devices including The Nook.
The free product I use is Calibre. Lots of options and fine control over documents. I download it from calibre-ebook.com. Nice UI. Very easy to import various types of documents and output to many other types of formats such as .MOBI, ePub, DocX, RTF, Zip and many more. It is a very powerful program. I played with various Calibre options and emailed the formatted .MOBI files to my Kindle. The new files automatically synched to the Kindle when I was wireless in seconds. Calibre did a great job!!
The formatting was 99.5% perfect for the great majority of pdf’s I converted and now happily read on my Kindle. Calibre even has a built-in heuristic option you can try that enables it to figure out how to improve the formatting of the raw pdf. By default it is not enabled. A few of the wider tables in my business continuity plans I have to scroll on the limited Kindle screen but I was able to minimize that by sizing the fonts and controlling the source document parameters.
Now any pdf or other types of documents can be enjoyed on a light, cheap, super power efficient e-reader. Let me know if this info helped you in any way.
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!rant
PUBLIC SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENT:
For AI, in particular Deep Learning developers, practitioners, hobbyists and otherwise people interested in the field.
If you go into the Pytorch website, click on resources and scroll down you will see a link to "Deep Learning with Pytorch" by Manning publications. This will give you access to the book, a book that if memory serves me well costs about 40+ in printing and the online book format is about 29 (again, if memory serves well)
The book is currently FREE and it does not ask you for an email address, you can just tell them why you want it for and they will give you the free pdf download.
I don't know how good the book is, but have found Manning to publish really good resources.
Do with this information what you want.
And yes, I am leaving the rant tag, so that more people can see this and take advantage of the opportunity in case of being interested and not having the money to purchase the book after the promotion is done and over with. Fuck you about tags and shit.9 -
People: "Well we could put this data in the address book.....?"
Me: "Wait, what does that data have to do with the address book? Does a given address need that data / is it specific to that address?"
People: "No it's not related to addresses ... we just thought we could put it there."
Me: ....
Me: "So if you use that address you always want that specific data you want stored in the address book?"
People: "Oh no it's not tied to addresses."
Me: ....
Me: "So help me out here, when do you use a given piece of data? In the example here, what made you add that information?"
-Silence-
People: "Um, I'm not sure."
Me: "I think it would be a good idea if we found out. That might provide us some important guidance here."1 -
RANT!
I still struggle to find the suitable address book software for our company. It supposed to be secure and inexpensive. But how so? It's flipping not possible to have both!
My boss answer to almost everything I say: Just do it! - in German: einfach machen! Please hulp!10 -
When it comes to the idea of programming and magic, or the comparison between software developers/engineers, computer scientists etc as magicians or wizards, nothing brings the idea much more close to hearth than the C programming language.
A while ago I read the R.A Salvatore books concerning Drizzt, the dark elf. I loved the books, have not continued reading them but I remember them vividly. There was one book in which a human magician came about wielding extremely explosive magic, humans were capable of channeling large amounts of it through explosive and unwieldly ends.
This is the same feeling I get from C
Consider:
int items[] = {1, 2, 3};
printf("Third : %i\n", 3[items]);
and fuck me if shit like the above is not dangerous, it makes sense, arrays have the first items of it server as the pointer address to a first element, doing the above operation returns the third element of the array of 3. But holy shit if I don't think this is dangerous and interesting as fuck
there are many more examples I have that I am finding through me fucking around with: language development (compiler, interpreter), kernel programming as well as net sec. C is the most powerful and devastating thing we have in our hands indeed.7 -
From the book
Refactoring JavaScript
Turning Bad Code into Good Code
Evan Burchard
HOW CONVERSATIONS ABOUT REFACTORING SHOULD GO UNTIL TESTS ARE WRITTEN
“I refactored login to take email address and username.” “No, you didn’t.”
“I’m refactoring the code to ____”
“No, you aren’t.”
“Before we can add tests, we need to refactor.” “No.”
“Refactoring th–”
“No.”
“Refa–” “No.”7 -
Compilers should just work for raw C with only static memory allocation. This isn't the bad old days where a couple of dudes wrote a short book explaining how C might probably should possibly work. I hear supposedly we have standards now.
Well, last week I lost 2 days to our compiler randomly forgetting that it wasn't okay to put a globally allocated uint32 at an address ending in 9. What? It had been handling this case without issue for more a year, but now after changing completely unrelated code we have this problem.
I'm not sure how to even deal with this idiocy so no doubt I'll continue working on it this week, too.
Thanks a lot, GCC.1 -
Note: I have deleted my previous version of this question as I found it lacking crucial information and therefore being prone to misunderstandings.
Question : In C/C++ you can position the keyword 'const' either left or right of the left-most type specifier. Which variant do you prefer?
I ask that because I'd like to hear your opinion. Although I have been working with C over three decades now, I only learned this a couple of years ago. After some experimentation I decided for myself, that I like the placement to the right more. Although the positioning to the left is taught in literally every book and course, the original placement suits me better.
One reason, of many, is the listing of many member variables in structs or classes. To have them nicely aligned, I always had to put 'const' either on the previous line or put in extra indention to everything non-const. That was quite irritating sometimes.
Another, and my main reason is, that when reading from right to left, the rhs variant just makes more sense than the lhs variant. Reading from left to right almost never makes much sense without straining your eyes. But that is, of course, highly subjective.
This is even more so if you have pointers. The 'const' keyword modifies the type identifier(s) to the left. So if the 'const' is (anywhere) left of the '*', the data is const. If the 'const' is right of the '*', the pointer address itself is const. The same applies to references.
Examples, read right-to-left:
int* const i; // i is a const pointer to int data
int const* i; // i is a pointer to const int data
int const* const obj; // i is a const pointer to const int data
The "classical" or "taught" way, that is found almost everywhere would read, still right-to-left:
int* const i; // i is a const pointer to int data
const int* i; // i is a pointer to int data const
const int* const obj; // i is a const pointer to int data const
Not only that the second "lhs" form reads worse, it also looks worse. In my opinion, the first "rhs" variant makes it simpler to quickly determine that we are dealing with three ints, while on the second "lhs" variant, one has to first get past the 'const' keywords.
I know that this is not only a matter of taste, but of course of agreement, too. You can not just go and switch the 'const' placement in long standing projects. That would surely piss of a lot of people. Or even cost you your job.
But I like to know what you people think and why.
Thanks a lot in advance!5 -
My own version of spaceinvaders
One tool to unite all the shitty software we have at fucking work (tickets, address book, asset management, remote desktop, ad scripts) -
Following an interview, I've been tasked with creating a "simple address book" webapp with Laravel and Vue.js.
There isn't much in the spec, with the only requirements being the use of Bootstrap, no auth, and inclusion of pagination and searching.
This is very easy with Laravel and my question to the community is how much further do I go with this?
Should I add alphabetical pagination alongside laravel pagination? What about a nice material ui?
I sent a design from Dribble to the employer and asked if making the app look fancy would be worth my time. He said I'm free to use any front end design and lib that I want if I'm able to demonstrate my use of them in code review, and he also said that the project "was only intended to take you a couple hours" which it would if I weren't to add a fancy ui.
So, shall I just make a simple app with Bootstrap tables, add responsiveness and keep the css semantic for brownie points, or go all out and spend a day or two making it beautiful? There is one other candidate so I have competition.1 -
I’ve built a ’self-serve’ inline-app/widget for our customers to book a moving quote appointment themselves. One of the ‘pages’ has a couple address autocomplete form fields. I went with a service called placekit, but used a CDN they offer. There is a more robust node.js library they offer, but couldn’t get it working. To be fair, I am completely new to node.js. I want to learn it, any recommended tuts, or readings? The company I work for is really invested in old technologies, we use SVN still. Does node play well with SVN? The IT lead for my department is opposed to connecting node to our DB, but I think we will be forced to for our upcoming automated testing project, it too is node, that’s what prompted my goal to learn it.2
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