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Search - "bytes"
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ARGH. I wrote a long rant containing a bunch of gems from the codebase at @work, and lost it.
I'll summarize the few I remember.
First, the cliche:
if (x == true) { return true; } else { return false; };
Seriously written (more than once) by the "legendary" devs themselves.
Then, lots of typos in constants (and methods, and comments, and ...) like:
SMD_AGENT_SHCEDULE_XYZ = '5-year-old-typo'
and gems like:
def hot_garbage
magic = [nil, '']
magic = [0, nil] if something_something
success = other_method_that_returns_nothing(magic)
if success == true
return true # signal success
end
end
^ That one is from our glorious self-proclaimed leader / "engineering director" / the junior dev thundercunt on a power trip. Good stuff.
Next up are a few of my personal favorites:
Report.run_every 4.hours # Every 6 hours
Daemon.run_at_hour 6 # Daily at 8am
LANG_ENGLISH = :en
LANG_SPANISH = :sp # because fuck standards, right?
And for design decisions...
The code was supposed to support multiple currencies, but just disregards them and sets a hardcoded 'usd' instead -- and the system stores that string on literally hundreds of millions of records, often multiple times too (e.g. for payment, display fees, etc). and! AND! IT'S ALWAYS A FUCKING VARCHAR(255)! So a single payment record uses 768 bytes to store 'usd' 'usd' 'usd'
I'd mention the design decisions that led to the 35 second minimum pay API response time (often 55 sec), but i don't remember the details well enough.
Also:
The senior devs can get pretty much anything through code review. So can the dev accountants. and ... well, pretty much everyone else. Seriously, i have absolutely no idea how all of this shit managed to get published.
But speaking of code reviews: Some security holes are allowed through because (and i quote) "they already exist elsewhere in the codebase." You can't make this up.
Oh, and another!
In a feature that merges two user objects and all their data, there's a method to generate a unique ID. It concatenates 12 random numbers (one at a time, ofc) then checks the database to see if that id already exists. It tries this 20 times, and uses the first unique one... or falls through and uses its last attempt. This ofc leads to collisions, and those collisions are messy and require a db rollback to fix. gg. This was written by the "legendary" dev himself, replete with his signature single-letter variable names. I brought it up and he laughed it off, saying the collisions have been rare enough it doesn't really matter so he won't fix it.
Yep, it's garbage all the way down.16 -
Eight bytes walk into a bar.
The bartender asks, "Can I get you anything?"
"Yeah," reply the bytes.
"Make us a double."2 -
My first contact with an actual computer was the Sinclair ZX80, a monster with 512 bytes of ram (as in 1/2 kbyte)
It had no storage so you had to enter every program every time and it was programmed in basic using key combinations, you could not just write the commands since it did not have memory enough to keep the full text in memory.
So you pressed the cmd key along with one of the letter keys and possibly shift to enter a command, like cmd+p for print and it stored s byte code.8 -
MTP is utter garbage and belongs to the technological hall of shame.
MTP (media transfer protocol, or, more accurately, MOST TERRIBLE PROTOCOL) sometimes spontaneously stops responding, causing Windows Explorer to show its green placebo progress bar inside the file path bar which never reaches the end, and sometimes to whiningly show "(not responding)" with that white layer of mist fading in. Sometimes lists files' dates as 1970-01-01 (which is the Unix epoch), sometimes shows former names of folders prior to being renamed, even after refreshing. I refer to them as "ghost folders". As well known, large directories load extremely slowly in MTP. A directory listing with one thousand files could take well over a minute to load. On mass storage and FTP? Three seconds at most. Sometimes, new files are not even listed until rebooting the smartphone!
Arguably, MTP "has" no bugs. It IS a bug. There is so much more wrong with it that it does not even fit into one post. Therefore it has to be expanded into the comments.
When moving files within an MTP device, MTP does not directly move the selected files, but creates a copy and then deletes the source file, causing both needless wear on the mobile device' flash memory and the loss of files' original date and time attribute. Sometimes, the simple act of renaming a file causes Windows Explorer to stop responding until unplugging the MTP device. It actually once unfreezed after more than half an hour where I did something else in the meantime, but come on, who likes to wait that long? Thankfully, this has not happened to me on Linux file managers such as Nemo yet.
When moving files out using MTP, Windows Explorer does not move and delete each selected file individually, but only deletes the whole selection after finishing the transfer. This means that if the process crashes, no space has been freed on the MTP device (usually a smartphone), and one will have to carefully sort out a mess of duplicates. Linux file managers thankfully delete the source files individually.
Also, for each file transferred from an MTP device onto a mass storage device, Windows has the strange behaviour of briefly creating a file on the target device with the size of the entire selection. It does not actually write that amount of data for each file, since it couldn't do so in this short time, but the current file is listed with that size in Windows Explorer. You can test this by refreshing the target directory shortly after starting a file transfer of multiple selected files originating from an MTP device. For example, when copying or moving out 01.MP4 to 10.MP4, while 01.MP4 is being written, it is listed with the file size of all 01.MP4 to 10.MP4 combined, on the target device, and the file actually exists with that size on the file system for a brief moment. The same happens with each file of the selection. This means that the target device needs almost twice the free space as the selection of files on the source MTP device to be able to accept the incoming files, since the last file, 10.MP4 in this example, temporarily has the total size of 01.MP4 to 10.MP4. This strange behaviour has been on Windows since at least Windows 7, presumably since Microsoft implemented MTP, and has still not been changed. Perhaps the goal is to reserve space on the target device? However, it reserves far too much space.
When transfering from MTP to a UDF file system, sometimes it fails to transfer ZIP files, and only copies the first few bytes. 208 or 74 bytes in my testing.
When transfering several thousand files, Windows Explorer also sometimes decides to quit and restart in midst of the transfer. Also, I sometimes move files out by loading a part of the directory listing in Windows Explorer and then hitting "Esc" because it would take too long to load the entire directory listing. It actually once assigned the wrong file names, which I noticed since file naming conflicts would occur where the source and target files with the same names would have different sizes and time stamps. Both files were intact, but the target file had the name of a different file. You'd think they would figure something like this out after two decades, but no. On Linux, the MTP directory listing is only shown after it is loaded in entirety. However, if the directory has too many files, it fails with an "libmtp: couldn't get object handles" error without listing anything.
Sometimes, a folder appears empty until refreshing one more time. Sometimes, copying a folder out causes a blank folder to be copied to the target. This is why on MTP, only a selection of files and never folders should be moved out, due to the risk of the folder being deleted without everything having been transferred completely.
(continued below)29 -
Okay so my brother in law has a laptop that is... To put it mildly, chockful of viruses of all sort, as it's an old machine still running w7 while still being online and an av about 7 years out of date.
So my bro in law (let's just call him my bro) asked me to install an adblock.
As I launched chrome and went to install it, how ever, the addon page said something like "Cannot install, chrome is managed by your company" - wtf?
Also, the out of date AV couldn't even be updated as its main service just wouldn't start.
Okay, something fishy going on... Uninstalled the old av, downloaded malware bytes and went to scan the whole pc.
Before I went to bed, it'd already found >150 detections. Though as the computer is so old, the progress was slow.
Thinking it would have enough time over night, I went to bed... Only to find out the next morning... It BSoD'd over night, and so none of the finds were removed.
Uuugh! Okay, so... Scanning out of a live booted linux it is I thought! Little did I know how much it'd infuriate me!
Looking through google, I found several live rescue images from popular AV brands. But:
1 - Kaspersky Sys Rescue -- Doesn't even support non-EFI systems
2 - Eset SysRescue -- Doesn't mount the system drive, terminal emulator is X64 while the CPU of the laptop is X86 meaning I cannot run that. Doesn't provide any info on username and passwords, had to dig around the image from the laptop I used to burn it to the USB drive to find the user was, in fact, called eset and had an empty password. Root had pass set but not in the image shadow file, so no idea really. Couldn't sudo as the eset user, except for the terminal emulator, which crashes thanks to the architecture mismatch.
3 - avast - live usb / cd cannot be downloaded from web, has to be installed through avast, which I really didn't want to install on my laptop just to make a rescue flash drive
4 - comodo - didn't even boot due to architecture mismatch
Fuck it! Sick and tired of this, I'm downloading Debian with XFCE. Switched to a tty1 after kernel loads, killed lightdm and Xserver to minimize usb drive reads, downloaded clamav (which got stuck on man-db update. After 20 minutes... I just killed it from a second tty, and the install finished successfully)
A definitions update, short manual skimover, and finally, got scanning!
Only... It's taking forever and not printing anything. Stracing the clamscan command showed it was... Loading the virus definitions lol... Okay, it's doing its thing, I can finally go have dinner
Man I didn't know x86 support got so weak in the couple years I haven't used Linux on a laptop lol.9 -
Of course, the variable for fields should be called "flds", those 2 bytes saved will help us so much! For a small price of this shit being not really readable anymore. Is it "floods"? "fleeds"?6
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Two bytes meet. The first byte asks, “Are you ill?”
The second byte replies, “No, just feeling a bit off.”1 -
Using void 0 instead of undefined is just ridiculous. Sure, you save 3 bytes but I've seen the code you write, you definitely should not care about that.7
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More linux driver woes:
Driver is passed a file position and byte count when asked to read from a device. Sounds easy, right? FUCK no.
For reads, driver is passed struct `filp` with field `f_pos`, a direct pointer to the same struct field, int `count` as a number of bytes to read, and `buf` to return those bytes with. Problem is, requesting, say, 256 bytes from location 10000000h will give the driver `filp->f_pos = 0`, `f_pos = 256`, and `count = 0`. I don't know how to fix this and there's NO help for this shit. None whatsoever.
This shit, right here, is why Linux drivers suck ass.4 -
I'm building a script parser to make mods for a game I like. The first step is to write an importer.
The documentation is nonexistent and I'm delving into byte manipulation, which I'm not familiar with - at all. I'm porting existing code from Java to C#, and everything is similar but different enough that I can't always just to a 1:1 transfer.
I get everything working, cleaned up and split into classes so I can write the exporter.
I do an import and the file won't parse. I try all previously know working files and still no good. I clean, rebuild, clean rebuild, run, debug, restart my computer, clear my cache, clean, rebuild. No good.
IT WAS WORKING 5 MINUTES AGO
Proceed to revert to every version from the last hour. No dice.
I was in the wrong folder the whole time.
Navigate to the proper folder, open the filename I know to be good and bingo, works like a charm.
The same project caused me headaches because I had a "== -1", when it should have been "== 1". Between my inexperience with byte manipulation and my untreated astigmatism, I was nearly sent to the shadow realm fixing that.3 -
I am trying to extract data from the PubSub subscription and finally, once the data is extracted I want to do some transformation. Currently, it's in bytes format. I have tried multiple ways to extract the data in JSON format using custom schema it fails with an error
TypeError: __main__.MySchema() argument after ** must be a mapping, not str [while running 'Map to MySchema']
**readPubSub.py**
import apache_beam as beam
from apache_beam.options.pipeline_options import PipelineOptions
import json
import typing
class MySchema(typing.NamedTuple):
user_id:str
event_ts:str
create_ts:str
event_id:str
ifa:str
ifv:str
country:str
chip_balance:str
game:str
user_group:str
user_condition:str
device_type:str
device_model:str
user_name:str
fb_connect:bool
is_active_event:bool
event_payload:str
TOPIC_PATH = "projects/nectar-259905/topics/events"
def run(pubsub_topic):
options = PipelineOptions(
streaming=True
)
runner = 'DirectRunner'
print("I reached before pipeline")
with beam.Pipeline(runner, options=options) as pipeline:
message=(
pipeline
| "Read from Pub/Sub topic" >> beam.io.ReadFromPubSub(subscription='projects/triple-nectar-259905/subscriptions/bq_subscribe')#.with_output_types(bytes)
| 'UTF-8 bytes to string' >> beam.Map(lambda msg: msg.decode('utf-8'))
| 'Map to MySchema' >> beam.Map(lambda msg: MySchema(**msg)).with_output_types(MySchema)
| "Writing to console" >> beam.Map(print))
print("I reached after pipeline")
result = message.run()
result.wait_until_finish()
run(TOPIC_PATH)
If I use it directly below
message=(
pipeline
| "Read from Pub/Sub topic" >> beam.io.ReadFromPubSub(subscription='projects/triple-nectar-259905/subscriptions/bq_subscribe')#.with_output_types(bytes)
| 'UTF-8 bytes to string' >> beam.Map(lambda msg: msg.decode('utf-8'))
| "Writing to console" >> beam.Map(print))
I get output as
{
'user_id': '102105290400258488',
'event_ts': '2021-05-29 20:42:52.283 UTC',
'event_id': 'Game_Request_Declined',
'ifa': '6090a6c7-4422-49b5-8757-ccfdbad',
'ifv': '3fc6eb8b4d0cf096c47e2252f41',
'country': 'US',
'chip_balance': '9140',
'game': 'gru',
'user_group': '[1, 36, 529702]',
'user_condition': '[1, 36]',
'device_type': 'phone',
'device_model': 'TCL 5007Z',
'user_name': 'Minnie',
'fb_connect': True,
'event_payload': '{"competition_type":"normal","game_started_from":"result_flow_rematch","variant":"target"}',
'is_active_event': True
}
{
'user_id': '102105290400258488',
'event_ts': '2021-05-29 20:54:38.297 UTC',
'event_id': 'Decline_Game_Request',
'ifa': '6090a6c7-4422-49b5-8757-ccfdbad',
'ifv': '3fc6eb8b4d0cf096c47e2252f41',
'country': 'US',
'chip_balance': '9905',
'game': 'gru',
'user_group': '[1, 36, 529702]',
'user_condition': '[1, 36]',
'device_type': 'phone',
'device_model': 'TCL 5007Z',
'user_name': 'Minnie',
'fb_connect': True,
'event_payload': '{"competition_type":"normal","game_started_from":"result_flow_rematch","variant":"target"}',
'is_active_event': True
}
Please let me know if I m doing something wrong while parsing the data to JSON. Also, I am looking for examples to do data masking and run some SQL within Apache Beam4