Linux sucks.

Now now, chill. I'm using it as my main OS for a few years now. I know what I'm talking and this title is a bit click-baity, but this just has to go out there:

1. It's usable as a Windows replacement just fine - FALSE. XFCE4 is years old and buggy as hell especially on multi-monitor set-up, Gnome3 gets stuck more often than my Windows 98 machine used to, KDE is like a rich kid on meth. Plug in Bluetooth headphones? Well no, sorry, you have to research that online, since you'll probably need to install some packages for it to work. Did I say "work"? Well no, because after more research you realize that Debian on Gnome3 on gdm3 launches pulseaudio on its own, so you have 2 instances of pulseaudio, and one of them is stealing your headphones sometimes and you either have no sound or shitty sound. How do I know that you ask? The same way I know everything else - every time you try to do something new on any Linux, it involves a ton of research. Exciting research, don't get me wrong, but at this point it looks more like a toy than a reliable desktop computer operating system.

2. And why am I using pulseaudio? Why not alsa? years ago people were discussing on forums that pulseaudio is old and dead, yet here we are with new LTS release of Ubuntu still shining with Pulseaudio. How about several different service management systems being deprecated by new ones, each having different configurations and calling methods? Apparently systemd is old and lame now. It's a mix of 10 year old software that works badly, with a 5 year old replacement that works worse, somehow trying to live under the same roof. Does it work? Ask my headphones who sound like a fucking dial-up modem.

3. Let's talk about displays, shall we? xorg is old and deprecated, right? We got Wayland that's mostly stable. Don't know what that is? That's just basic knowledge for Linux. And when you try to install network-manager, it also tries to install Mir toolkits. Because why the fuck not install 3 display managers when you want a network manager, of which one is old and dying, one is young and stupid, and another is an infant that died of cancer?

4. Want to integrate with Google Drive? Yeah, there's a tool that mounts the drive as a local directory. Yeah only for Ubuntu. Want it on Debian? You need to compile it. Oh wait, it's on Ocaml, because fuck mainstream languages, we're hipsters. How do you compile Ocaml? Well you need to have Ocaml on your system, dummy. How do you do that? Well you need to compile Ocaml. Ok, how do I do that? Well, git clone, download and install some dependencies, configure, make... oh sorry, you're using libssl1.0.2g when you need libssl1.0.1f, nope, sorry, won't work. Want to install libssl1.0.1f? Why? You already have the "g", stupid! Want to remove libssl1.0.2g? Bye-bye literally everything that you have on your PC. But at least you got the "f". Does it work now? Well no, because you need libssl1.0.2g for another dependency to work.
And all I ever wanted was to get a fucking document from google drive (not nudes, I promise).

5. Want to watch a movie? Let me tear that screen in half and make the bottom half late by a couple of frames, because who needs vertical sync, right? Oh you do? Well install the native drivers maybe. Oh you have? Welcome to eternal Boot to Recovery mode, motherfucka!

---------------------------------

Yeah, most of the times things work just fine. But the reason I know what those things are and how they work is not curiosity. The reason that I know the inner workings of Linux much better than the inner workings of Windows, is because in those few years that I've been using it full time, it has caused me 10 times more headache than I have ever experienced with other systems. And it's not the usual annoyances like "OMG it rebooted when I didn't ask it to", but more like "Oh, it won't work and I need 2 days to find out why" kind of stuff, because even if you experience the same thing again, it's always caused by some new shit and the old solution won't work any more.

I still love it, and will continue to use it. I don't know why really. Maybe because I'm not afraid of fucking it up any more? Maybe because I can do what I want in it and recovering will be easier than on Windows?
It's a toy for me, after all these years. And I also use it for professional reasons.

But whenever someone presents it as a better alternative to Windows, I just want to puke.

> installs devRant app on my iPhone
> too lazy to type my 18-char random password on mobile
> password manager app not on App Store yet
> dig up my old Macbook
> install XCode & homebrew package manager
> install 2 other package managers using homebrew
> install App deps from the 2 package managers
> query stackoverflow for why my deps fail to install
> open App in XCode
> setup Apple provisioning profile
> trust my certificate on my iPhone
> dig up an old router & setup a local WiFi network
> start a server on my laptop to serve my PGP keys
> download my PGP keys to my iPhone
> app crashes
> open an issue on github with steps to reproduce & stacktrace
...
> type my 18-char random password
> rant on how I wasted an entire afternoon

First rant from a phone without Google services.

Put shitloads of Google/fb etc domains in the hosts file so my phone cant reach those either.

Root firewall blocks everything except for devrant, a download manager, fdroid and firefox focus.

As for my phone, I'm Google free!

Dev manager: great news guys. We’ve built a new tool to do automated testing on apps. We’ve gotten rid of the old Appium solution we were using and built this new one.

Me: why not just use the inbuilt native stuff? Click to record works really well.

Manager: nah we thought it would be more flexible to build it ourself.

Me: ... ok ... moving on ... how does it work?

Manager: well this new .jar, you download it, pass in a config file, setup up your simulator and appium and the jar will do everything for you.

Me: ... wait you said you hate Appium? Now you’ve built a wrapper around it? And it doesn’t even set everything up, you’ve to do it all by hand?

Manager: oh we had too, would be too much effort to replace it. Don’t worry we can now write all our tests in .yaml config files instead of using Appium.

Me: so we’ve lost the ability of auto-complete and type ahead, everyone has to upskill on a new tool, it offers no new features over what’s available out of the box and we’ll have to deal with new bugs and maintenance and stuff our self ... because we need more flexibility?

Manager: oh don’t worry. The guy who built it is staying here. He’s going to deal with bug fixes and add features. He’s only one guy, but he’s really sharp, it’ll be great for us and the team.

Me: ... ... ...

*audible noise of soul breaking*

Me: ... ok thank you. I’ll look into this new tool

IT Manager: What kind if attachment did you send me in that email?

Me: A .zip?

IT Manager: ...?

Me: A zip file? Zipped Folder?

IT Manger: ...?

Me: Umm... the data file you needed has to be sent in a zip folder because 6 different file types combine to make it? Just download the .zip and extract?

IT Manager: I don't know how to extract the files?

Me: ...

Never in my life I was scared as today.
I recently left a big company to work for a small one as the first internal developer.
Had a small issue in the production server. The fix was easy, just remove a single table entry. And... *drum roll*... I forgot to add a where clause. All orders were lost.
No idea if we had backups or anything, I quickly called the one other IT dude in the company.
He had no clue where are the backups and how to find them.
Having some experience with Nmap, I quickly scanned our network and found a Nas device.
There was a backup, whole VHD backup. 300GB of it, the download speed is around 512kb/s. No way I can fix it before management finds out, but then an idea came to mind. Old glorious 7zip. Managed to extract only the database files, sent them to the server and quickly swapped them. Everything was fine... The manager connected 5 minutes later. Scariest 45 minutes of my life...

Needed to download all my music from Google music, their download manager is crap (on ubuntu)

Decided to use their API, found a gem that works perfectly. Started downloading it.

Told my GF how I wanted to code something cool but gound someone else did, her response:

So why doesn't google make something ?
Me:They did, but it sucks in linux, and they have their API's which work fine.

And how are normal people supposed to make it work then?
Me: well it works, jut have to install this and run the CLI with.... wait.. am I not normal?

I guess we are not normal in the eyes of some people.

Internet Download Manager costs about $24. It's not cross platform either. uGet UI looks old as fuck and shows positive in virustotal.

So I decided to do what most other devs would do in my situtation. I created my own download manager in QT 💪. It uses 16 different threads to download files and pretty much utilises all my bandwidth.

TL;DR: Fuck you Apple.

10:30 PM, parent needs iPhone update to update Messenger. How hard can this be?
Need to update iPhone from 9.x to latest, which is so outdated it still required iTunes. Fk.

Boot iTunes on Windows 10 pc that is at least 10 years old.
Completely unresponsive
Crash in task manager
Launch and is completely unresponsive. (Also starts playing unrequested music.. Oh joy..)
Fuck this, go to apple.com to download iTunes exe
Gives me some Microsoft store link. Fuck that shit, just give me the executable
Google “iTunes download”. click around on shitty Apple website. Success.
Control panel. Uninstall iTunes. (Takes forever, but it works)
Restart required (of fucking course).
2 eternities later. Run iTunes exe. Restart required. Fk.
Only 1 eternity later. Run iTunes, connect iPhone.
Actually detects the device. (holy shit, a miracle)
Starts syncing an empty library to the phone. Ya, fuck that.
Google. Disable option. Connect phone. Find option to update.
Update started. Going nowhere fast. Time for a walk at 1:00 AM punching the air.
Come back. Generic error message: Update failed (-1). Phone is stuck installing update. (O shit)
1x hard reset
2x hard reset
Google. Find Apple forum with exact question. Absolutely useless replies. (I expected no less)
Google recovery mode. Get into recovery mode.
Receive message: “You can update, but if it fails, you will have to reset to factory settings”. Fuck it, here we go.
Update runs (faster this time). Fails again. Same bullshit error message. (Goddammit, fuck. This might actually be bad.)
Disconnect phone.
… It boots latest iOS version. (holy shit, there is a god)
Immediately kill iTunes. Fuck that shit.
Parents share Apple account
Sign in, 2FA required.
Fat finger the code.
Restart “welcome” process.
Will not send code. What. The. Fuck.
Requests access code on other parent’s iPhone.
No code present. What???
Try restarting welcome process again. No dice. (Of course)
Set code on other parent’s iPhone.
Get message “Code is easy to guess”. Ya. IDGAF
Use code on newly updated iPhone. Some success.
Requires reset of password.
Password cannot be the same as old password (Goddammit)
Change password.
Welcome process done.
Sign in again on same phone after welcome process done in settings. (Nice.)
Sign in again on other phone with updated password
Update Messenger.
Update hangs. Needs more space.
Delete shit.
Update frozen in App Store (Really??)
Restart iPhone.
Update Messenger.
Update complete past 2. Well that was easy.

Apple, fuck you.
Some call Android unintuitive, but I look at the settings app on iPhone and realize you aren’t any better.
This company hasn’t been innovative since 2007. Over 1000 USD for a phone? Are you fucking kidding me?
Updating an iPhone from iOS 9.x is probably uncommon anymore. But this is a fucking joke. Fix your shit.
Shit like this is why I’ll never again own an Apple product. I have HAD IT with the joke of a business.

Thanks for reading.

I automated the process of downloading songs from YouTube and transferring them to my phone.

This is how it works, very simple:
- I have a youtube playlist in which I add songs that I'd like to download
- When I run my python script, it parses my playlist and checks to see if I have added any new songs that aren't already downloaded
- Uses a library to download MP3 for all the songs I want to download
- Transfers all those MP3 files to a designated folder that is tracked by Google Music manager
- Google Music manager syncs those songs to my phone and downloads them for offline playback

That's it 😎 No need for YouTube Red

I'm going to run this script 24x7 on a Raspberry Pi, so everytime I add a new song to the playlist, script starts it's job without me running the script manually.

OK I can't deal with this user anymore.

This morning I get a text. "My laptop isn't getting emails anymore I'm not sure if this is why?" And attached is a screenshot of an email purporting to be from "The <company name> Team". Which isn't even close to the sort of language our small business uses in emails. This email says that his O365 password will soon be expiring and he needs to download the attached (.htm) file so he can keep his password. Never mind the fact that the grammar is awful, the "from" address is cheesy and our O365 passwords don't expire. He went ahead and, in his words, "Tried several of his passwords but none of them worked." This is the second time in less than a year that he's done this and I thought we were very clear that these emails are never real, but I'll deal with that later.

I quickly log into the O365 admin portal and reset his password to a randomly-generated one. I set this to be permanent since this isn't actually a password he should ever be needing to type. I call him up and explain to him that it was a phishing email and he essentially just gave some random people his credentials so I needed to reset them. I then help him log into Outlook on his PC with the new password. Once he's in, he says "so how do I reset this temporary password?" I tell him that no, this is his permanent password now and he doesn't need to remember it because he shouldn't ever need to be typing it anyway. He says "No no no that won't work I can't remember this." (I smile and nod to myself at this point -- THAT'S THE IDEA). But I tell him when he is in the office we will store the password in a password manager in case he ever needs to get to it. Long pause follows. "Can't I just set it back to what it was so I can remember it?"

You know it's 2016 when you have to download a package manager to download a package manager to... :S

There are a shitload of them.

Not actually a rant, but need some place to vent it out.

The company where I work develops embedded devices enabling the automobiles to connect to the internet and provide various end user infotainment services. My job mostly relates to how and when we update the devices.

There are about 100 different
variants of the same device, each one different from the other in a way that the process required to update for each of these device variants is significantly Different. Doing this manually would be and actually was a nightmare for almost everyone, so I set out on writing a tool that addresses this issue.

I designed my solution mostly in Python, allowing me for quick prototyping. First of all, I'd never written a single line of python code in my life. So I learn python, in matter of 2 nights. I took days off from work so I could work on this problem I had in my head. And in about 4 days, I was up with a solution that worked, reliably. I prepared a complete framework, completely extendable, in order to have room for 101th variant that might come in at any time. And then to make it easier and a no Brainer for everyone, the software is able to automatically download nightly builds and update the test devices with nothing more than a double click.

But apparently this wasn't enough. Today I found out that someone worked on a different solution in the background just a week ago, while reusing most part of my code. And now they start advertising their solution over mine, telling everyone how crappy my code is. Seriously, for fucks sake, my code has been running without issues since more than a year now. To make it worse, my manager seems to take sides with the other guy. I mean I don't even have someone to explain the situation to.

I really feel betrayed and backstabbed today. I worked my days, my nights, my vacations on this code. I put blood, sweat and tears into this. I push my self over my limits, and when that was not enough, I pushed my self even harder. But it all seems in vain today. All the hours that I spent, just to make it easier for everyone... All a complete waste. When you write code with such passion, your code is like your family... You want to protect it... But with all this office politics and shit, I seem to be losing my grip.

I've been contemplating the entire night, where I might have gone wrong, what could I've done to deserve this...but to no avail. I'm having troubles sleeping, and I'm not sure what I should do next.

Despair, sheer bloody Despair!

This isn't as much of a rant as the story of my worst abuse of computer knowledge.

This happened a couple years ago. When I was in high school, I had this friend/enemy relationship with this guy, lets call him Thomas. He loved to pull pranks on people. He had a similar firend/enemy relationship with my brother, and after one prank, my brother decided to get revenge. And by revenge, he meant asking me to make a virus.

I knew the guy, and I agreed. We thought about what type of virus we could make that would be funny, and not too damaging. We decided on a program that would play annoying sound effects every few minutes. Short enough to be noticable, long enough that Thomas would give up and not try to investigate.

I won't bore you with the details of the program. It was a very simple C app, very small, named "Counter-Strike-Global-Offence-Free-Download-Totally-Legit.exe". It was clearly visible in task manager, but since it was so small and barely used CPU or RAM it would stay near the bottom. I tried loading a custom sound effect, but it turned out the windows default "invalid sound effect" was much more annoying than any custom sound I could find.

The "Infecting" portion consisted of moving the .exe to the start menu startup folder while Thomas left his laptop unattended. My brother handled this part.

I unfortunaly left the country soon after and never actually saw the effect the program had on Thomas. I assumed my brothers laughing would give it away rather fast and he could simply remove it from his startup folder. However, my brother told me he still complained about it for months, before finally bringing the laptop to a repair center that found the totally legit CS:GO exe. My brother ended up telling him soon after, but this was still the best prank I ever pulled.

I walk into the kickoff meeting today. The first part of this project had 5 developers and a project manager. Former project manager handled communication and sheltered us from bullshit. We built an amazing piece of software in a very short time. Customers were so amazed that they decided to reboot the project, boost the funding by several million, and let us go again. They specifically requested the same team.

Now the team looks like this: the neediest tester guy, a UX lady that doesn't have any UX background, an agile "visionary", a project manager that doesn't understand how development works, a solutions architect, 3 COTS platform specialists, a devops specialist, and an account lead. They have booked all kinds of workshops and other shit to kick things off.

So development capacity is only 60% of what it was. Management ratio was 1:5 before. Now the management ratio is 9:3. The new project manager thinks developers should be on more customer calls and responding to all customer emails during sprints. We already built this system and devops pipelines end to end. The COTS people, solutions architect, or the UX person can't program. They want us to magically convert this custom application into one based on COTS. What we need to do is make the rest of the business processes that we omitted, integrate known feedback, rework the backend, build better automated testing, improve logging and reporting, add another actor to the system, add a different authentication method, and basically work through the massive backlog.

How do they think this is going to work? Do they think we can download a custom engineered enterprise grade software system from Microsoft and double click all the way to customer satisfaction? The licenses alone are too much for the customer on an ongoing cost basis. I guess we can discuss it during the agile team-building weekend at some remote lake that the team "visionary" has set up. For the sake of fuck.

Like development isn't hard enough. Hire two more developers and lose all of the dead weight. Get a project manager that won't let the trivial shit roll down on us. What the fuck.

Chrome download manager sucks 😡

Dual Boot Linux & Windows.

I hardly ever see anyone do it right. And there is just two tricks that make a completely new experience out of it. I am not sharing it with you to be nice, I am sharing because I am curious if you're already doing it.

1. Install on a second hard drive, not a different partition. Learn which button to hold on the boot screen to select the boot drive. You can still chain-load via Grub, but the major advantage, updates of neither OS will fuck up your boot loader. You can update it abso-fucking-lutely risk free. Second advantage, advice 2. becomes trivially easy.

2. Set up a virtual machine. Select as its hard drive the raw disk volume where you have installed your Windows. You can do this with VirtualBox, but QEMU with virtual machine manager make is far easier to set this up in. You can now start Windows under Linux as a virtual machine. You can always start a small application, but the big deal is installing. Start a Steam download, have it installed and ready without switching over. Running windows updates. And when you then have time to play the game, just reboot and you have it already installed.

I feel like many are not aware that you can start a virtual machine of a real hard drive. It's one of those things that improve usability of it enormously. It's something where many will just not think about it because they keep dual booting and virtual machines in two different categories in their brains, but immediately will think it is obvious as soon as they hear about it.

So, who already did this? Raise your hands!

Manager : I wish to upload an excel sheet from my browser, and based on *some conditions*, could you please highlight the cells with incorrect values.

Me: And then download the new edited sheet with highlighted cells, right?

Manager: No just change the file that I have on my desktop. So I can repeat whenever I need, with the same file.

Me: :/

Last Monday I bought an iPhone as a little music player, and just to see how iOS works or doesn't work.. which arguments against Apple are valid, which aren't etc. And at a price point of €60 for a secondhand SE I figured, why not. And needless to say I've jailbroken it shortly after.

Initially setting up the iPhone when coming from fairly unrestricted Android ended up being quite a chore. I just wanted to use this thing as a music player, so how would you do it..?

Well you first have to set up the phone, iCloud account and whatnot, yada yada... Asks for an email address and flat out rejects your email address if it's got "apple" in it, catch-all email servers be damned I guess. So I chose ishit at my domain instead, much better. Address information for billing.. just bullshit that, give it some nulls. Phone number.. well I guess I could just give it a secondary SIM card's number.

So now the phone has been set up, more or less. To get music on it was quite a maze solving experience in its own right. There's some stuff about it on the Debian and Arch Wikis but it's fairly outdated. From the iPhone itself you can install VLC and use its app directory, which I'll get back to later. Then from e.g. Safari, download any music file.. which it downloads to iCloud.. Think Different I guess. Go to your iCloud and pull it into the iPhone for real this time. Now you can share the file to your VLC app, at which point it initializes a database for that particular app.

The databases / app storage can be considered equivalent to the /data directories for applications in Android, minus /sdcard. There is little to no shared storage between apps, most stuff works through sharing from one app to another.

Now you can connect the iPhone to your computer and see a mount point for your pictures, and one for your documents. In that documents mount point, there are directories for each app, which you can just drag files into. For some reason the AFC protocol just hangs up when you try to delete files from your computer however... Think Different?

Anyway, the music has been put on it. Such features, what a nugget! It's less bad than I thought, but still pretty fucked up.

At that point I was fairly dejected and that didn't get better with an update from iOS 14.1 to iOS 14.3. Turns out that Apple in its nannying galore now turns down the volume to 50% every half an hour or so, "for hearing safety" and "EU regulations" that don't exist. Saying that I was fuming and wanting to smack this piece of shit into the wall would be an understatement. And even among the iSheep, I found very few people that thought this is fine. Though despite all that, there were still some. I have no idea what it would take to make those people finally reconsider.. maybe Tim Cook himself shoving an iPhone up their ass, or maybe they'd be honored that Tim Cook noticed them even then... But I digress.

And then, then it really started to take off because I finally ended up jailbreaking the thing. Many people think that it's only third-party apps, but that is far from true. It is equivalent to rooting, and you do get access to a Unix root account by doing it. The way you do it is usually a bootkit, which in a desktop's ring model would be a negative ring. The access level is extremely high.

So you can root it, great. What use is that in a locked down system where there's nothing available..? Aha, that's where the next thing comes in, 2 actually. Cydia has an OpenSSH server in it, and it just binds to port 22 and supports all of OpenSSH's known goodness. All of it, I'm using ed25519 keys and a CA to log into my phone! Fuck yea boi, what a nugget! This is better than Android even! And it doesn't end there.. there's a second thing it has up its sleeve. This thing has an apt package manager in it, which is easily equivalent to what Termux offers, at the system level! You can install not just common CLI applications, but even graphical apps from Cydia over the network!

Without a jailbreak, I would say that iOS is pretty fucking terrible and if you care about modding, you shouldn't use it. But jailbroken, fufu.. this thing trades many blows with Android in the modding scene. I've said it before, but what a nugget!

Manager: client is breathing down our necks for that sockets interface. Wrap up any last minute changes, fix the documentation and get everything posted!

Me:*does all the things.*

That was two days ago. Client hasn't even logged in to download the software and the documentation.

Bought a new 4TB disk for my gaming rig, pulled out the old 1TB one and plugged it back on my old machine. Installed Ubuntu Server. Instalation went well after I figured I needed the IOMMU turned on.

Later went to play some BfA on the gaming rig and... No boot disk recognized. Ahn?
My SSD is plugged in. SATA cable is well seated. Thing was working not 30min before...

After a loooong time trying to figure out if it was hardware or micro$hit's Windows 10, I finally figured it:
It seems Windows installed its EFI partition on the old HDD. So my SSD is basically a single, large NTFS volume. Now I need to download the Win10 ISO, boot up the install disk and use the cmd prompt to create a new EFI partition on my SSD. Ugh.

Fucking Windows didn't think to install its boot manager on its own disk. "Nah, just gonna use this random magnetic disk here". Why? My login queues are already huge on WoW, why must this wankstain of an OS annoy me even more?

I am currently looking for a DAW (Digital Audio Workstation), because my music projects are starting to get a little too complex for Audacity.

So I started looking for a good, easy-to-learn, ideally free program, and quickly learned that Avid now has a free version of Pro Tools called First.

So I go to their site and fill out the registration form to get the download. In addition to creating an account with Avid, you also need to create one with iLok, which apparently has something to do with how they manage their licenses. Kinda overkill for a free program, but okay...

I download the program (about 3gigs...), install it and try to start it. It gives me an error message about missing some service. Okay? I'm confused because I notice that an 'Application Manager' service has appeared in my tray, and when I open that I can log into my new account just fine. But it still doesn't work.

There's a link in the error message to the iLok website, and it looks like ai need to dowload and install another component. Why didn't that get installed with the program if it's required?

Hmm...

So I go to the iLok site, download it and install it. Pro Tools First still won't start. I realize that the PTF installer asked me to reboot, which I didn't do because: a) I always have a lot of windows open, and b) How often is a reboot ACTUALLY required? Why would you need to reboot?

So I (begrudgingly) reboot, and now the program seems to start initializing... but then it throws an error message about some plugin that it can't load because it doesn't work for the 64 bit version. Then... why are you even looking for it?
And then it says something like: 'I can't handle that, I'm just gonna shut down'.

What?

I try starting it again. Same error appears, but then it gets past it this time... Only to throw another error message about something else it can't load, and therefore it must shut down.

Deep breath.

Third time is the charm, the program actually made it to the project create/load screen! Huzzah!
So I look around a bit, but don't do much. It doesn't seem too intuitive to me, so I start watching some tutorials on YouTube from Avid themselves. It's a little late by now, so I don't get my hands dirty that day.

Next time I want to try out the program I start it up, still get error messages, but it does seem to initialize okay. But then the 'Create project' button doesn't react when I press it.

It turns out that the program takes a looong time to log in to the avid account, even though the manager service is running and logged in...

When it finally logs on I create a new blank project, but it doesn't ask me where to save it to. I see there is a counter saying 1/3 and looking around I find some info about 'cloud based projects'.

It would seem that this program only supports saving projects to the cloud, and you get only 3 projects total. Three. THREE?

Ahem...

I add an instrument track to my new project and select the one and only plugin, which is a synth. I don't see the plugin window, like in the tutorials I watched. I fiddle around with the windows, but I only manage to get the layout fucked up. There's a handy 'Window' menu, but none of the options resets the view. The main window is now sporting a WINDOWS FUCKING 7 BORDER! And partially blocking the view of the top menu.

Blaaargh!

Frustrated, I shut the program down and restart it. I now select one of the project templates (after waiting for it to LOG IN AGAIN!) in the hope that I might have a bit more luck with that starting point.

But when the template has loaded, out of nowhere, the program goes from maximized to windowed mode! And the fucking Win7 border is back again, still messing with the main menu!

FFS!

I get the sucker maximized again and select one of the synth tracks, and Lo and Behold! The synth plugin window actually shows up! But of course there is no sound produced when I play, neither with the keyboard or my midi keyboard.

Oh no, that would have been too easy.

I see some the meters moving when I play, but no sound is produced. I check the options menu, but find out nothing useful except for the fact that the program only support 48kHz sample rate. That's pretty disappointing when you have a 192kHz/24bit soundcard.

I'm done. This piece of shit software is NOT for me. It's bloated, complicated to sign up for and install, extremely limited and buggy as hell!

The final insult is that it takes 5 minutes to uninstall because there is no uninstall option in the so-called 'Application Manager' (of course fucking not!), and doing it through Programs & Features there are 5 (FIVE!!) different apps and services to uninstall, one by one.

0/10, would not recommend.

Bower, YOU FUCKING PIECE OF CRAP PACKAGE MANAGER!

WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK?

This asshole software is fucking with me and steals my time!

bower mapsjs-core#* cached e-tag:64e4e0850

bower mapsjs-core#* resolved e-tag:41af792c9

bower mapsjs-core#* install e-tag:41af792c9

What would you think is the installed version? WRONG! It's the fucking old cached version.

What the fuck is happening? Probably it's thinking "oh, this is the cached version, I'm looking if there is a new version for it. Yep, new version. I'll download it. But I have a cached version in the user home-directory, I better tell the that I installed the new version but take the old one."

Crap software.

The reason for half the web-dev world sufferings is that Microsoft won't stop choking their users with explorer or edge, and half of the client are too dumb or lazy to download a different browser to test stuff. Fuck this shit man! Nothing works the way it should on this bitch.

Everytime my manager says- It should work perfectly on IE because client doesn't have any other browser, I curse IE for exisiting. If you can't improve it, just remove it you freakin' sadists. It'll not be an embarrassment to load something better on your OS. If anything, it'll get people to like you maybe. Like you for accepting your fuckery and making a decision in favor of the web dev world and innocent windows users, who only use your explorer to download other browser asap. For just that one time and for all your arrogance, you're making the whole world suffer.

Im deploying a Machine Learning Model to production. We dont have an automated deployment pipeline for the models, so we do it manually exposing the models through a rest api.

I asked for the model artifact to the DS, they didn't have permissions to download files from Databricks.

I asked their manager for the artifact. He told me that he has the permissions, then bullshitted me with something about the formal process, some shit about proper permissions handling, and that they do no have a standard process for sharing files right now so i should wait.

I was like "bro, share the artifact with me to unblock my work, then stablish your process, i dont care". He said no, and just after that he started a thread involving half of the middle management and data engineers asking for feedback on how to stablish a process for sharing databricks files. Just Wtf.

I got pissed, i reach out to his superior (good friend of mine), that was on vacation btw, and i told him the situation. He opened slack and humiliated him so bad, that i almost felt bad for the manager jajajajaja.

I grabbed my model artifact and got out of there instantly.

If any of you out there are forced to develop on a Windows machine and want to make it just a little more linux like, download the chocolatey package manager. It's similar to Macs brew or linux apt, yum, pacman, zypper; but for windows.

Could make you're life just that much easier

TLDR;
I remissness about Yahoo site builder and talk about finding the record of the Google search that changed my life a long time ago and I think it's fucking great.

Earlier I re-installed google chrome but unlike every other time, this time I forgot to turn off the auto-sync feature. I only realized this when I opened gmail and it pre-populated my login info with the info of my very first, long forgotten gmail account.

So naturally I went exploring... after going through the mails I decided to check out the actual Google account to see if there was anything of interest there and lo and behold I found around 7 years of browsing history that I had no idea Google stored at the time.

As scary as it was to see I'm kinda glad about it now because aside from finding out that I was going through an Asian porn phase in 2008 I also found the one Google search record that changed my life.

It was a search to download Yahoo site builder followed by a bunch more on how to use it.

I had stumbled across a random article about it and it caught my eye because I needed a website for the grocery store I was a manager of back then.

Thankfully it was a fucking horrible WYSIWYG editor. I recall it acting almost identical to Word at the time - I would save and back up my site constantly because moving something 1px would fuck the layout up and burn everything to the ground, cntrl+z would try and do something, reversing only my last action while leaving the rest of the site in tatters and I didn't have the skills to understand or fix it...

Ultimately my frustration led me learn a bit of html & css and a week or so later It became apparent it would be easier to scratch code the damn thing so I uninstalled Yahoo site builder and started all over again.

Learning & building that site in notepad ignited my passion for coding and less than a year later I left my shitty dead end job to join a brand new tech company created with the help of a like minded investor officially employed as a developer. Let help you understand just how big this achievement was for me - I had been trying to find a job, ANY job in I.T even at a call center level without success for 6 years because I dropped out of school.

In 6 years as an active job seeker I only received one phone call about a job opportunity which ended very quickly once they realised they had misread my CV. In all those years I never even got a single job interview.

After that I spent the next 3 years rolling out and improving the cloud based loyalty card system I had written for my store out on a national scale and the rest is history. Since then I have never been judged by a crappy piece of paper, hated my job or struggled to find a new one.

What a beautiful search result that was to find.

I dedicate this rant to Yahoo, with my sincere gratitude for making a shitty WYSIWYG editor that was so bad it pissed me off enough to make me actually learn something.

So been working with Linux for almost 10 years now, so am not new with this. But yesterday, a friend had difficulties accessing Wikipedia and their sister sites so I tried to help him out, you know, the usual way. Ping, Direct IP, DNS, and proxies/VPN, checking his /etc/hosts, but to no avail. Decided to download TeamViewer and install it so that I can help him out remotely. Went afk for 30min for dinner and when I came back, TeamViewer installation .Deb installer literally uninstalled every single software from my Kubuntu machine, from Spotify and slowly even my file manager and terminal was uninstalled. When it was over, even my grub was uninstalled.

Had anyone faced the same issue before?

Day 2 of trying to get into android development with flutter.

- Downloads Android Studio
- Tries to download Android-SDK from Android Studio's SDK Manager: "Error: Android SDK is missing or out of date".

YEAH NO FUCKING WAY, THAT'S WHY I'M TRYING TO DOWNLOAD IT.

- Uninstalls flutter and android studio

Lost all motivation to get into mobile development again.

Dependency hell is the largest problem in Linux.

On Windows, I just download an executeable (.exe) file, and it just works like a charm! But Linux sometimes needs me to install dependencies.

At one point, I nearly broke my operating system while trying to solve dependencies. I noticed that some existing applications refused to start due to some GLIBC error gore. I thought to myself "that thing ain't gonna boot the next time", so I had to restore the /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/ folder from a backup.

And then there is a new level of lunacy called "conflicting dependencies". I never had such an error on Windows. But when I wanted to try out both vsftpd and proFTPd on Linux, I get this error, whereas on Windows, I simply download an .exe file and it WORKS! Even on Android OS, I simply install an APK file of Amaze File Manager or Primitive FTPd or both and it WORKS! Both in under a minute. But on Linux, I get this crap. Sure, Linux has many benefits, but if one can't simply install a program without encountering cryptic errors that take half a day to troubleshoot and could cause new whack-a-mole-style errors, Linux's poor market share is no surprise.

Someone asked "Why not create portable applications" on Unix/Linux StackExchange. Portable applications can not just be copied on flash drives and to other computers, but allow easily installing multiple versions on a system. A web developer might do so to test compatibility with older browsers. Here is an answer to that question:

> The major argument [for shared libraries] is security, that if there is a vulnerability in a commonly-used library, then only that library has to be updated […] you don't have to have 4 different versions of a library installed

I just want my software to work! Period. I don't mind having multiple versions of libraries, I simply want it to WORK! To hell with "good reasons" for why it doesn't, and then being surprised why Linux has a poor market share. Want to boost Linux market share? SOLVE THIS DAMN ISSUE!.

Understand that the average computer user wants stuff to work out of the box, like it does in Windows.

I will never fully understand why some people think command line package managers are "more complicated" than searching for and downloading software through the web browser.

I feel like the only reason why they think this is because the command line is not a user-friendly tool to them. All of my friends on Discord use Windows, and after showing them what a fantastic tool the Chocolatey package manager is, they don't want to have anything to do with it, because it involves entering commands.

I give up. If they don't want to use this amazing tool, that's their loss, not mine. I will just continue to run

> choco upgrade outdated -y

and update all of my programs with a single command, while they have to download installers and manually go through the setups.

Why the fuck does Windows still not have a fcking decent package manager?

I hear you "but but but, there is Chocolatey, it's great, try it!". Well yeah if you only want binaries.

But I do need to, you know, develop and compile things, and without includes, code, and a reliable way to produce working binaries from that, it's useless.

Guess who needs to download dependencies one by one, compile them one by one?

Don't get me started on broken MinGW, or the "recommended" way of doing a bat script to have proper includes (what the hell, that's the entire purpose of env variables), or the fact that there is NO convention on where to install things.

Wouldn't call it a feature. More like worst practice. Data manager (and my boss at the time) kept using our website as a way to host large files 3rd party vendors/partners could download instead of using one of the many secure transfer methods out there to send them data. This was sometimes extremely sensitive data. No authentication or security that I could find. I went ballistic on him after seeing that.

Well....this shit again
This morning or technical manager calls me in his office and says he needs to discus something
sits me down and started talking about a project he needs
A school management system says he presented some demos at the client yesterday but they didn't really like options at the table

Manager: So can you get us something really quick?

Me: Well... what's the time line?
Manager: They needed this like yesterday!
Me: Aaaah....well i think i can have something by 2moro morning
Manager: Aaah! No!.... 2moro it's too late need something like fast
Me: Ok so will look for some online solutions and open source projects
Me:.....
Opens browser, opens github, download project, runs project
project isnt looking good enough
starts designing UI
Manager:
downloads a system
installes
runs
closes
reopens
meet with a "Buy to continue using system" message
calls me
Manager: this was just a demo now it needs payment what should we do
Me: I'll come up with something by 2moro

Shall I completely switch to linux???

Can i find drivers for graphic drawing tablet and awesome download manager????

Those two have been keeping me in windows for years...

A system of universally accessible storage. Here is what I mean:
1. The fastest protocol available would be used (LAN:smb, else:sftp)
2. File transfers would be direct (no download from A, upload to B)
3. Transfers could be resumed
4. Transparent to normal programs
5. Integrated with GUI file manager

But I'm extremely bad at C, so...

So apparently you can only download your albums twice from google, if you want them afterwards you install their shitty "music manager"

there's almost no other service where the artists I want to support upload their music, but holy fuck I wish I know this bullshit sooner. I honestly wish the cunts responsible for this a chronic pain. the more the better

Been trying to scrap Microsoft's docs page for a while now for offline reference, but its been hell. Tried Httrack Copier, Internet Download Manager, Scrapbook e.t.c but it just doesn't do it well. I gave up two months ago. Was looking at the docs today again and saw a link at the bottom that says 'Download PDF'. I almost cried.

Hi there Devs and ranters, I'm new to devrant (well I've have the app for about 20 days and just read about stuff)

So, I just recently discovered that I want to Develop web and mobile apps, before this I was studying to be a Project manager..

In the past I would usually come app with great app ideas and would just think "why hasn't anyone made this yet" then I'd let it go.
But then one day last year an amazing idea for an app hit me for a huge organisation in my country and I figured I could probably get paid for this, but yet again I was too fucking shallow to realise that I should've made it myself.

So I took my app idea and carelessly shared it with a developer who then decided to create the app and not include me at all, he just said "im gonna let you know when it's done", stupid me just agreed to that. Time went by and I never heard anything from the guy, tried to call but he wouldn't pick up, went to his place and he already moved out.

At this point I already gave up on looking for him.

A few weeks later I'm on the playstore browsing for apps and there it was, my fucking app. I decide to download it and inside every fucking thing was exactly as I told the developer, all the functions and options that would be for that app were all in there.

I was a little mad, but after staying with the app for a few days I noticed that it didn't work at all, there were no notifications, no interaction nothing, it's just like a static app, then I was really just disappointed,..

This was about 2 months ago,

Since then I have come up with a lot of other great app ideas and I decided to start learning to code so I can develop my own mobile and web apps..

And just last week I had an idea for an app for the Univ that I graduated at, spoke to the director about it and he wants a full presentation in a month.

So Devs, don't be the guy in the story that doesn't involve the person that gave you an awesome idea, also don't be me in the story because I was a stupid lil shit for not realising what I wanted to do sooner!

Warning I get really nit picky in this

I’ve been enjoying my Manjaro experience so far but the only gripe I’ve managed to come across is fucking VS Code. Since I downloaded it via .tar.gz I have to redownload the .tar.gz each fucking update. WHICH WOULDNT BE A PROBLEM IF THE WEBSITE JUST GAVE ME A SOLID DOWNLOAD LINK I CAN USE IN AN AUTOMATION SCRIPT BUT FUCKING NO ITS AN EVENT FOR WHEN YOU CLICK ON THE LINK FOR .tar.gz SO FUCK ANY PYTHON OR BASH SCRIPTS I COULD COME UP WITH,

and before someone fucking says it yes I can use “Code - OSS” (the version on github) which I know I fucking am using it but I don’t like it even though it is the exact same thing, minus text that is supposed to say VS Code and the vscode icon.

Unless I’m retarded and could have updated it with the tar.gz manually or automating it somehow (which I couldn’t find a solution for Manjaro/arch based systems) I’m still getting used to Linux and installing software without a package manager (which I’m still using it but for some things I try to install it without a package manager) so if I am missing something please just ignore my dumbass and educate me.

And if you try to recommend using the Snap store, let me stop you. No.

My manager said hey why don't you react? I was like... react to what??? He said oh gosh Download React.js I mean😁👊👊

I'm trying to create a new download manager.
I'm almost hate multithreading

Guys, sorry to ask this question, is there any app that could download a video while watching it? similar case to internet download manager, they add an extension for you in the browser once it detects that there is a video it will show you a small bar to download it, the thing is, this works perfectly on windows however i moved to Linux and IDM is not supported under linux OS unfortunately

tl;dr: azure support are utter bollocks

so about late june-ish, my azure student subscription expired, which i wasn't notified about. but that's fine, surely once it's expired i can get my data back, right?

...right?

i try to download the .vhd file with my nodejs project on, and then contact their support after failing to mount the vhd. i asked them whether they could get my data for me (or at least provide some clear instructions, in case i mounted the vhd incorrectly). instead i was told to do loads of things, creating blobs, making snapshots, etc... all of which did absolutely nothing.

mid-august, i'm still trying to get my data back, when i get a call from, you guessed it, microsoft azure. a manager had told me that all my data had been lost, and that i was eligible for $500 in credit in compensation. i was angry (and rightly so), and refused their offer. i emailed azure support again expressing my anger, for them to tell me that my data wasn't lost...?

come to mid-september, and and i was fed up of waiting for my project. i wanted to finalise the fucker and launch the website, but azure had stalled me for well over two months. i had to put some money towards azure just to start up the vps, zip up the project, transfer it to another vps, and shut it back down.

and that kids, is why i wouldn't ever recommend azure.

ps: yes, i'm backing up files daily from now on

I literally create a template of flutter project with state manager (provider) . Other words, I hate setting up a new project in flutter every Fking time. So I created a Cli (written in dart) app that flutter create something something and delete the main.dart and download the templates from my source from GitHub. Like a few folders and files.

Yes...I am this lazy

How can a novel emerging challenger software (written in Rust) take me 4 hours to install (still ongoing)?

Today I have decided to give Pijul a go. Pijul describes itself as a theory-sound alternative to Git, which I have wanted to get away from for a while now, due to various reasons -- many of which I saw Pijul advertise to have solved on design level.

So I set away a day to learn Pijul, today. Well, 4 hours after I sat down -- after a number of hilariously wonky failures of "Rust ecosystem" to do the right thing as I had to install Rust with some shell one-liners those insane wizards recommend for installation process (all in the name of "stability but not stagnation") -- Pijul has now been installing with the blasted `cargo` for an hour now (that's after 3 hours of getting to the point where `cargo install pijul` stopped exploding in my face) -- telling me I only have 40 crates more to install. Are they throttling me, perhaps? I don't care -- I should have been installing Pijul from a repository in accordance with my Linux distribution, or -- at worst -- download a BLOODY COMPILED PROGRAM IMAGE.

What is it with the hipster developers today? Everything they get of tools, they subsume and churn out intricate complexities the likes of which we hadn't seen yesterday. Tell me fellow developers who think installation of your software has to require three and a half novel "installation solutions" to which I can't be arsed to be made privy -- do you think your life today is easier than, I don't know -- wrangling with a Makefile and a C compiler (which today thankfully can do rather good job of standards compliance)?

I mean I wouldn't mind Pijul being written in Rust -- but it turns out Rust's advertised elegancy in practice is wrapped in so much "giftwrap" I feel like what desire I had to learn Rust myself, I'll stear well clear.

Here's an advice for developers in general -- an advice continiously ignored for decades -- stop blowing your original scope of delivery in auxilary packages you think you need to reinvent just because you can or because your mom is out of town! For programming languages like Rust this most certainly entails NOT writing your own package manager, with its own package delivery mechanism that has its own configuration file format and virtual machine to configure dependency resolution or what have you!

You wanted to write a programming language that has novel features you think we need? Fine -- write one and stop there. Watch it grow, and watch people who are busy working on other parts (scopes) of software to integrate your offer.

What a shitshow. Stop smuggling alternative package managers, installers, and discombulators with your actual product -- I only want the latter, I don't want the rest of your damn piping, walls, roof and a cathedral on top of it!

Don't be that guy starting with a pin, and ending up with a fucking diorama miniature of a pig farm in Netherlands. Jesus.

Why is the 1password login process so shitty? You need 4 different inputs, and every time you login it forces you to download the same PDF you have saved 10 times. there's no skip option, and it doesn't memorize that you have already freaking downloaded it.
on top of that, my company has restricted the accounts to not reset their password on their own. How the hell this helps a company? Why this option even exist?
I mean I have to DM my manager: Sorry dude, I'm so clumsy that I have accidentally deleted my password, can you initiate a reset password process so I can have access to 1password?

Hmm the build fails because it wants to download grade through http.

"Ah I'll just install it with my package manager"

One apt call later: *still tries to manually download a zip of gradle*

Cool okay, what?

I just want to test and change a minor thing in an open source project, why are you making this so difficult...

I need to download an installer from my Visual Studio Subscription, and I find out the hard way our subscription manager reassigned my subscription to someone else. Now I lost access to my licenses.

And the subscription manager doesn't reply to his emails.

I guess that SQL Server setup can wait.