Not a rant, but I found this funny enough to share.

About two weeks ago, I’m contacted by a third party development firm that is responsible for building the next iteration of a control board were are developing. Alongside build of the PCB they were scoped to flash the firmware and verify all connected components.

During the call, they tell me they don’t have the resources to build our testing environment with the Ansible script I provided, and they don’t know if the updates they have made will work with our control system. Ugh...really...

I attempt to walk them through the 3 pretty simple commands to launch the playbook. Instead of listening, their project manager insists that I need to load up the environment and send them a ready to go system.

I quickly load up a RaspberryPi and prepare it for shipping. I hand the box to our shipping clerk and fill out the shipping request documentation. Then about a week goes by and this is where the story really begins.

I get an email from the same rep asking where the environment is, and I head down to the warehouse to inquire where the RaspberryPi might be. After speaking with the head clerk, we can’t seem to track down the package. I’m assured that they will find the Pi and send me the shipment update.

I pass the information along and after about a day and a half I still didn’t receive word back from the warehouse team. I load up another Pi and head back down to the warehouse. I follow up with the warehouse staff. They inform me that they have not been able to locate my package and another warehouse worker is called over. He says he hasn’t seen it, but they they were having a food day that day and he thinks more than likely someone ate it.

Like it didn’t even click at first but after a few seconds I realize that these guys have literally been looking for a pie for the past two days...and I JUST DIE.

After the 5 or so minutes of laughing I show them the newly flashed RaspberryPi, and of course they know exactly where the original one was.

It’s shipped out now, but wow. Also, it turns out the PCB manufacturing company didn’t even really need this and it was all a guise to hide that they are behind schedule and that they will not be able to finish the work scoped. FML!

Navy story time again. Grab that coffee and fire up Kali, the theme is security.
So, when I got promoted to Lieutenant Jr. I had to attend a 1-year school inside my nostalgic Naval Academy... BUT! I was wiser, I was older... and I was bored. Like, really bored. What could go wrong? Well, all my fellow officers were bored too, so they started downloading/streaming/torrenting like crazy, and I had to wait for hours for the Kali updates to download, so...
mdk3 wlan0mon -d
I had this external wifi atheros card with two antennae and kicked all of them off the wifi. Some slightly smarter ones plugged cables on the net, and kept going, enjoying much faster speeds. I had to go to the bathroom, and once I returned they had unplugged the card. That kind of pissed me off, since they also thought it would be funny to hide it, along with the mouse.
But, oh boy, they had no idea what supreme asshole I can be when I am irked.
So, arpspoof it is. Turns out, there were no subnetworks, and the broadcast domain was ALL of the academy. That means I shut EVERYONE off, except me. Hardware was returned in 1 minute with the requested apologies, but fuck it, I kept the whole academy off the net for 6 hours. The sysadmin ran around like crazy, because nothing was working. Not even the servers.
I finally took pity on the guy (he had gotten the duties of sysadmin when the previous sysad died, so think about that) and he almost assaulted me when I told him. As it turned out, the guy never had any training or knowledge on security, so I had to show him a few things, and point him to where he could study about the rest. But still, some selective arp poison on select douchebags was in order...
Needless to say, people were VERY polite to me after that. And the net speed was up again, so I got bored. Again. So I started scanning the net.
To be continued...

Sometimes I think back to all the funny shit that happened and how simple stuff fucks everyone

- tired Database engineer deleting (not dropping, literally rm -rf) the database files on the wrong server

- Microsoft delivering viruses through updates

- Pissed and stubborn dev deleting his one line library repo which does something like removing a char left side of string fucking an unmeasurable amount of other projects

- Adobe getting hacked and exposed for storing passwords in plain texts

- a doubled line causing a bug called heartbleed in a fuckton of webservers

- a Tutorial Company getting kicked from github because their repo got so big github staff had to maintain the repo manually

- and an old one: bad code crashed a space shuttle

updates...

Fuck strict corporate software policies, just let me WORK (⁠╯⁠°⁠□⁠°⁠）⁠╯⁠︵⁠ ⁠┻⁠━⁠┻

When I came to this new workplace I was given a Windows laptop. And it came with a bunch of pre-installed corporate stuff and policies like automatic mandatory frequent driver and windows updates. Although I prefer linux, I thought, maybe I'll switch later, first let's see how everything works here, since on Windows I had all VPNs, certificates and other corpo stuff pre-configured out of the box. But imagine missing a standup, because of windows update in the morning. Or missing audio, because of drivers update in the middle of the meeting. And make it every week or so. Also, I couldn't not install my portable DAC drivers, because limited access, blah blah fuck me. And many other small things that I vaguely remember by now.
Later corpo decided to add a tracking plugin into a browser and that was it for me. Gladly, corpo policy allows using Linux (they have their own modified Ubuntu version), which has MUCH less of this crap. I mean, it's still somewhat managed by corpo (like I can't get rid of duplicated PPA, lol.. and sometimes I need to wait like 1-2 mins to login to my laptop because of login server timeout), but that's still better...

Linux, home, sweet home, I missed you <3

Also, I dodged the bullet. Win11 upgrade was a funny shit show to watch :D

I have had it with the new pm for my project. We've had to literally write down rules for him to follow on how we want to run our project.
- we always go over time on standup because he's asking everyone specific questions about each ticket we're working on instead of just letting us give our updates. Wrote a rule for not doing that.
- he gets overly excited to get things done to the point that he's approved a PR himself and merged a production release during off hours.
- we're a team of 3 devs but he has 7 big items he wants us to work on concurrently.
- we use jira to keep track of things but he insists on us updating a spread sheet that he made as well. We just straight up told him no but he'll bring it 3 times every week.
- he wants us to write a report of our daily progress in our jira ticket before we give the same updates on standup
- every time I give him an estimate, he tells the clients it's a promise we'll get it done by x date.
- he never pushes back and says yes to everything
- oh here's a funny one, he's "reviewed" my code several times

Idk what to do here anymore. We've literally talked to him about all of these issues. He'll change for a few days and go back to doing whatever he does.

Why do updates always say "About" (Windows, Linux and Android also) about the remaining time? Is it because they are having their yoga lession at the time and we are interrupting them or something? Are we actually waiting for m to take their tea? A simple, "Please wait" would suffice I guess...

Forced Updates...
A lot had changed in computing over the last few years. One thing people seem to HATE for varying reasons. I personally don't mind, since they won't be going away and I can handle their little screwups when they happen. But now EVERYONE is doing it. Apple, Google, Microsoft, and their partners have ushered this in era where machine control is placrd in the hands of the OS developers. What I find funny about that is that they say they are doing it to help less tech-savvy people stay safe, yet a good portion of problems people ask me about come right after a forced upgrade. Come on! If you're gonna do it, at least make it worth the problems!