Join devRant
Do all the things like
++ or -- rants, post your own rants, comment on others' rants and build your customized dev avatar
Sign Up
Pipeless API
From the creators of devRant, Pipeless lets you power real-time personalized recommendations and activity feeds using a simple API
Learn More
-
!rant && sarcasm
For a long time now I've been trying to convince people to use secure communication. I'm used to getting called "paranoid", but the killer phrase always was (and still is): "Why do you want me to encrypt my communication, I HAVE NOTHING TO HIDE, so I don't care who's reading it" - "It's not about hiding something, it's about private stuff staying private" - "Yeah, whatever"
"I have nothing to hide". That always killed the conversation... until I asked them to hand me their phones, unlocked, for 5 minutes.
"No" - "Why? I thought, you had nothing to hide and don't care who's reading it?" - "Uhmmm..."
More and more people around me are popping up in my Signal contact list.
Looks like they suddenly care a lot about private stuff staying private </sarcasm>11 -
Fuckin RAZER. Part 2. "SOLVED!!!"
This will be both a rant and a shout out.
Firslty, fuck RAZER. I don't who in the actual fuck makes the software for these peripherals, but while the hardware is decent the entire software team should be tarred and fucking feathered. Just beaten bloody with a rubber hose. And then publicly paraded and shamed through whatever backwater shithole they call home all while their mothers look on crying their eyes out.
Anyway, some of you may be familiar with my Razer peripherals on Mac saga.
To refresh your memories... I got 4 razer devices for my b-day from my wife. I was very stoked. They work great on Windows 10. They work for shit on Mac and the software to manage their colors, Synergy 3, is not available on Mac, and the version that is, Synergy 2, basically does not work and hasn't worked for like two years and would only work for two of these peripherals anyway and it would appear Razer does not give a shit. Fuck.
Ok, we caught up? Good.
In our last episode I ran up a full Windows 10 VM AND a full Debian VM just so I could jumpstart these god damn peripherals into a solid color.
Why so much work?
Because by default they rotate the color spectum fucking SEPARATELY... so it's just a god awful mess of rando RGB.
So, by running Synergy 3 on the Windows side, and then an open source package called Poloychromatic on the Debian side I was able to patch together preferences through the two programs... and I found quitting out of them hard kept the keyboard, mouse, mousemat, and dock color settings until the next reboot while working on my Mac.
For WEEKS I WENT THROUGH THIS FUCKING PROCESS AT EVERY REBOOT.
Reboot. Run up Windows 10 VM, update Synergy 3, log into Synergy 3, Open Synergy 3, Wait like 90 seconds, Synergy 3 finally fucking gets ahold of my mouse pad, mouse, and dock (not the keyboard).
Run up Debian VM (at least its fast), start polychromatic, set the keyboard solid color.
Then quit them both and my colors are set until reboot.. This is, for lack of a better turn of phrase, the most fucking ridiculous thing ever.
I had to do a 400 fucking megabyte update today for the Synergy 3 software that lives INSIDE my god damn VM. A VM only created in the first damn place to run synergy 3 and then fucking die. And it put me over the edge.
I committed to finding a better way this evening. I started looking into trying to port polychromatic to macOS my god damn self only to find this badass mother fucking kid Ken Chen wrote a whole god damn macOS package and put it up on GitHub.
Fuck fucking YEEEEEESSSS!!!
So thanks to Ken Chen, a student from Australia with 12 Github followers, who was single handedly able to write a better software product than the entire fucking team at SHIT FOR BRAINS fucking Razer.
https://github.com/1kc/razer-macos4 -
I like my job, but it might become hard to stay when another job that's closer and offering 40% more falls into my lap...1
-
!rant
For all of youse that ever wanted to try out Common Lisp and do not know where to start (but are interested in getting some knowledge of Common Lisp) I recommend two things:
As an introductory tutorial:
https://lisperati.com/casting.html/
And as your dev environment:
https://portacle.github.io/
Notice that the dev environment in question is Emacs, regardless of how you might feel about it as a text editor, i can recommend just going through the portacle help that gives you some basic starting points regarding editing. Learn about splitting buffers, evaluating the code you are typing in order for it to appear in the Common Lisp REPL (this one comes with an environment known as SLIME which is very popular in the Lisp world) as well as saving and editing your files.
Portacle is self contained inside of one single directory, so if you by any chance already have an Emacs environment then do not worry, Portacle will not touch any of that. I will admit that as far as I am concerned, Emacs will probably be the biggest hurdle for most people not used to it.
Can I use VS Code? Yes, yes you can, but I am not familiar with setting up a VSCode dev environment for Emacs, or any other environment hat comes close to the live environment that emacs provides for this?
Why the fuck should I try Common Lisp or any Lisp for that matter? You do not have to, I happen to like it a lot and have built applications at work with a different dialect of Lisp known as Clojure which runs in the JVM, do I recommend it? Yeah I do, I love functional programming, Clojure is pretty pure on that (not haskell level imo though, but I am not using Haskell for anything other than academic purposes) and with clojure you get the entire repertoire of Java libraries at your disposal. Moving to Clojure was cake coming from Common Lisp.
Why Common Lisp then if you used Clojure in prod? Mostly historical reasons, I want to just let people know that ANSI Common Lisp has a lot of good things going for it, I selected Clojure since I already knew what I needed from the JVM, and parallelism and concurrency are baked into Clojure, which was a priority. While I could have done the same thing in Common Lisp, I wanted to turn in a deliverable as quickly as possible rather than building the entire thing by myself which would have taken longer (had one week)
Am I getting something out of learning Common Lisp? Depends on you, I am not bringing about the whole "it opens your mind" deal with Lisp dialects as most other people do inside of the community, although I did experience new perspectives as to what programming and a programming language could do, and had fun doing it, maybe you will as well.
Does Lisp stands for Lots of Irritating Superfluous Parentheses or Los in stupid parentheses? Yes, also for Lost of Insidious Silly Parentheses and Lisp is Perfect, use paredit (comes with Portacle) also, Lisp stands for Lisp Is Perfect. None of that List Processing bs, any other definition will do.
Are there any other books? Yes, the famous online text Practical Common Lisp can be easily read online for free, I would recommend the Lisperati tutorial first to get a feel for it since PCL demands more tedious study. There is also Common Lisp a gentle introduction. If you want to go the Clojure route try Clojure for the brave and true.
What about Scheme and the Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs? Too academic for my taste, and if in Common Lisp you have to do a lot of things on your own, Scheme is a whole other beast. Simple and beautiful really, but I go for practical in terms of Lisp, thus I prefer Common Lisp.
how did you start with Lisp?
I was stupid and thought I should start with it after a failed attempt at learning C++, then Java, and then Javascript when I started programming years ago. I was overwhelmed, but I continued. Then I moved to other things. But always kept Common Lisp close to heart. I am also heavy into A.I, Lisp has a history there and it is used in a lot of new and sort of unknown projects dealing with Knowledge Reasoning and representation. It is also Alien tech that contains many things that just seem super interesting to me such as treating code as data and data as code (back-quoting, macros etc)
I need some inspiration man......show me something? Sure, look for a game called Kandria in youtube, the creator, Shimera (Nicolas Hafner) is an absolute genius in the world of Lisp and a true inspiration. He coded the game in Common Lisp, he is also the person behind portacle. If that were not enough, he might very well also be Shirakumo, another prominent member of the Common Lisp Community.
Ok, you got me, what is the first thing in common lisp that I should try after I install the portacle environment? go to the repl and evaluate this:
(+ 0.1 0.2)
Watch in awe at what you get.
In the truest and original sense of the phrase (MIT based) "happy hacking!"9 -
TLDR; WINE+me=system binaries gone. (HOWTHEFUCKDIDIDOTHAT) Kernel panic. Core program files gone. I'll never have it fixed right. Will backup, then install fedora tomorrow.
I really like games and I'm sure there are many of you who can relate. Imagine my perpetual pain, being on the job hunt, no money, and only my Linux laptop for games. (It's only Linux because of a stupid accident and a missing windows installation disk, partly explained in a previous rant). My stack of games my dad and I have played over the years, going back to populous and before, looked light enough for my laptop to run them smoothly. I wanted to see if I could get one to work. My eyes settled on simcity 4 and Sid Meier's railroad tycoon, 13 and 10 years old, respectively. Simcity didn't work as many times as I tried following online instructions. Disk 1 went fine. Disk 2 showed up as Disk 1. Didn't think much of it, so long as the computer could read the contents. I downloaded playonlinux as that could apparently do the complex stuff for me. Didn't work. I gave up with it after an hour and a half.
Next was railroads. Put the disk in aaaand it says SimCity disk 1 is in the tray. Fuck right off, thank you very much. Eject, put back, reject, eject, fiddle in wineconfig, eject, more of this, and voilà it read as railroads :) Ran autoplay.exe with wine, followed instructions, installed it, and it worked! Chose single player, then the map and setting, pressed play, and all the models of the buildings and track were floating in the air over a green plane, the UI is weird and the map doesn't represent anything but trains. All the fkin land is gone, laying track is gonna be a ballache.
I quit it and decided bedtime.
Ctrl+alt+t
sudo shutdown -h now
shutdown not found.
sudo reboot
reboot not found
Que?
Nope, I don't like this.
Force choked my laptop by the power button. Turned it on again.
Lines of text appear.
Saw a phrase I've only ever seen on Mr Robot.
Kernel panic.
Nooooo thanks, not today, this is fiction.
I turned it off and on. Same thing. I read the logs and some init files couldn't be found. I got the memory stick I used to install mint in the first place and booted from that. I checked the difference between my stick's bin and sbin and the laptop's, and it was indeed missing binaries. Fuck knows what else has happened, I only wanted to play games but now I don't know what is or isn't in my computer. How can I trust what's on it now?
I go downstairs and tell my dad. He says something about rpm, but this is Linux so it won't work. I learn that binaries can be copied over, so maybe I can fix it.
Go upstairs again, decide not to fix it. Fedora is light, has a good rep for security, and is even more difficult to get games on, which is my vice. There are more reasons, but the overriding one is that I'm spooked by the fact that something I did went into and removed system binaries, maybe even altered others, so I want something I'm less likely to do that with. Also my fellow cs students used to hate on it but my dad uses and recommended it so I want to try it.
Also, seriously, fuck wine/PlayOnLinux/my inability to follow instructions(?)/whatever demons haunt me. Take your pick, at least one if not more is to blame and I can't tell which, but it's prooooobably the third one.
It's going to be 16 hours before I touch my laptop again, comments before I backup then install fedora are welcome, especially if they persuade me to do differently.
P.S thanks for reading this mind dump of a post, I'm writing while it's fresh but I'm tired AF.6
Top Tags
Weekly Rant
View