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My colleague sent me this. Think before you act!
Hi Bob,
This is Alan next door. I’m sorry buddy, but I have a confession to make to you.
I’ve been riddled with guilt these past few months and have been trying to pluck up the courage to tell you to your face but I am at least now telling in text as I can’t live with myself a moment longer without you knowing.
The truth is, I have been sharing your wife, day and night when you're not around.
In fact, probably more than you, particularly in the mornings after you’ve left for work.
I haven’t been getting it at home recently, but that's no excuse I know.
I can no longer live with the guilt and I hope you will accept my sincerest apologies.
My wife has known for some time now and I’ve promised her that it won't happen again.
Regards, Alan.
Bob, feeling anguished and betrayed, immediately went into his bedroom, grabbed his gun, and without a word, shot his wife twice in the head, killing her instantly.
He returned to the lounge where he poured himself a stiff drink and sat down on the sofa.
He took out his phone to respond to the neighbour's text and saw he had another message:-
Hi Bob,
This is Alan next door again.
Sorry about the slight typo on my last text, I expect you worked it out.
Anyway, but as I’m sure you noticed, my predictive text changed ‘WiFi’ To ‘Wife’.
Hope you saw the funny side of that.
Regards, Alan.9 -
Last day on the contract from hell. I'd written a project with one other person in our spare time that performed a critical business function. The following conversation was had between myself, the job thief who was handed my job and their manager, with the 10 other IBM GS "dev domain experts" assigned to that team sitting silently on zoom:
Moi: hey all, what seems to be the problem?
JT: how to update the java for requirement?
Moi: I would assume a text editor, have you tried intellij
JTM: she's talking about ticket BS-101, the data is wrong
Moi: ah, well, you might want to fix that
JT: how to fix?
Moi: update the database and update the logic that depends on it
JTM: what changes are those?
Moi: the ones described in the ticket, I would assume, I'm no longer on that project
JTM: didn't you write this application?
Moi: yes.
JTM: ok, so do you know how to fix the issue?
Moi: definitely
JTM: ok... ... Can you tell us how to fix it?
Moi: yes.
*The sound of silence*
JTM: *will* you tell us?
Moi: I would, but I'm already off the clock, and as of an hour ago I no longer have a contract. And even if I did, I don't have a contract or authorization to work on that system. I'm not actually being paid for this call.
JTM: ... What are we going to do about this?
Moi: I have no idea
JTM: ok, so we can look at getting a 1 month contract to support this
Moi: I'm sure our firm has someone who can definitely help you out
JTM: *heavy raging* ... Can you do the work?
Moi: Unfortunatley, I'm already committed to a new contract at another customer. I also don't do one month contracts. I'm an engineer, not a car wash employee
JTM: well, I don't understand how you can just leave us in the lurch like this?!
Moi: well, respectfully, it was your decision to cut me from the budget because you thought you were close enough to end of the project to get it across the line with junior resources.
Interjecting-JT: I am senior!
Moi: Right. So, basically, you took ownership of the product before go live. We advised against it, in writing, numerous times. We also notified you that we would not carry a bench, so the project resources are now working on other things. We can provide you with new resources for a minimum 6 month duration who can help you out. Also, since we've cycled out, our rate has increased per the terms of our MSA.
JTM: we don't have budget for that! How are we supposed to do this?!
Moi: *zoom glare at JT* that question is more appropriate for your finance officer and the IT director. I can send a few emails and schedule a call with your account representative and the aforementioned individuals so you can hash this out.
-_---------------
I'm free! 🥳 That said, still plenty of residual fodder I need to get out of my system on these guys. Might need to start my own Dilbert.12 -
Lost the password to the main modem/router of our apartment (live in a normal flat of which the rooms are rented out to three students and me) which is in my room and tried to reset the fucker for a trillion times but couldn't get back in, the password didn't reset.
Took a closer look at the reset button and suddenly noticed some text under it saying "wireless connect". Then I noticed a tiny round "hole" above the reset text.
Fuck my sideways, I've been pressing the "wireless connect" button instead of the actual reset one every goddamn time 😐
I can now port forward again 😊6 -
Dev: What do you think of the new version of the app?
Client: It’s great! We just have a couple notes of feedback we are working on compiling. We should have those to you by next week.
*Next week*
Client: We need another week to compile all of this feed back we are generating
*Another week goes by*
Client: Still working on it, it’s going to be a really thorough review when you get it though. No stone will be left unturned!
*2 weeks later*
Client: Here it is!
Attached: A word document with a single line of text “can’t nobody log in” next to a picture of the login screen with a red circle drawn around the login button
Client: Can you hurry up and action our feedback? We want to go live next week
Dev: …9 -
fork() can fail: this is important
Ah, fork(). The way processes make more processes. Well, one of them, anyway. It seems I have another story to tell about it.
It can fail. Got that? Are you taking this seriously? You should. fork can fail. Just like malloc, it can fail. Neither of them fail often, but when they do, you can't just ignore it. You have to do something intelligent about it.
People seem to know that fork will return 0 if you're the child and some positive number if you're the parent -- that number is the child's pid. They sock this number away and then use it later.
Guess what happens when you don't test for failure? Yep, that's right, you probably treat "-1" (fork's error result) as a pid.
That's the beginning of the pain. The true pain comes later when it's time to send a signal. Maybe you want to shut down a child process.
Do you kill(pid, signal)? Maybe you do kill(pid, 9).
Do you know what happens when pid is -1? You really should. It's Important. Yes, with a capital I.
...
...
...
Here, I'll paste from the kill(2) man page on my Linux box.
If pid equals -1, then sig is sent to every process for which the calling process has permission to send signals, except for process 1 (init), ...
See that? Killing "pid -1" is equivalent to massacring every other process you are permitted to signal. If you're root, that's probably everything. You live and init lives, but that's it. Everything else is gone gone gone.
Do you have code which manages processes? Have you ever found a machine totally dead except for the text console getty/login (which are respawned by init, naturally) and the process manager? Did you blame the oomkiller in the kernel?
It might not be the guilty party here. Go see if you killed -1.
Unix: just enough potholes and bear traps to keep an entire valley going.
Source: https://rachelbythebay.com/w/2014/...12 -
Talking to Best Buy customer support live chat trying to price match using friend’s laptop.
Typed in “<b>Hello</b>”
Oh cool.. it comes out as bold. Let’s get a scary as fuck screamer gif and img src it.
Me: *Posts picture*
Me: *Waits a few seconds*
Me: “Did you see that picture?”
Support: “No. Sir, could you tell me the item you want to price match?”
Me: “Okay hold on.”
Typed in “<script type=‘text/javascript’>window.alert(‘OOGA BOOGA BITCH’);</script>”
Me: “Did you see that?”
Friend: “Dude stop.”
I push my friend away since I’m on his Best Buy account.
Me: “Did you see a pop up?”
Support: “No.”
Me: “Okay okay hold on.”
You have left the chat.10 -
Prologue
My dad has an acquaintance - let's call him Tom. Tom is an gynecologist, one of the best in Poznań, where I live. He's a great guy but absolutely can not into tech of any kind besides his iPhone and basic PC usage. For about a year now I've been doing small jobs for him - build a new PC for his office, fix printer, fix wifi, etc. He has made a big mistake few years ago by trusting a guy, let's call him Shitface, with crating him software for work. It's supposed to be pretty simple piece of code in which you can create and modify patient file, create prescription from drugs database and such things. This program is probably one of the worst pierces of code I've ever seen and Shitface should burn for that. Worse, this guy is pretentious asshole lacking even basic IT knowledge. His code is garbage and it's taking him few months to make small changes like text wrapping. But wait, there's more. Everything is hardcoded so every PC using this software must have installed user controls for which he doesn't have license and static IP address on network card.
Part 1
Tom asked me to build him a new PC that will be acting like a server for Shitface's program. He needs it in Kalisz (around 150 km from my place). I Agred (pun intended) and after Tom brought me his old computer I've bought parts and built a new one. I have also copied everything of value and everything took me around three hours.
Part 2
Everything was ready but Shitface's program. I didn't know much about it's configuration so when I've noticed that it's not working even on the old PC I got a bit worried. Nevertheless I started breaking everything I know about it and after next three hours I've got it somewhat working. Seeing that there's still some problems with database connection (from Windows' Event Viewer) I wrote quick SMS to Shitface asking what can be wrong. He replied that he won't be able to help me any way until Monday (day after deadline). I got pissed and very courteously asked him for source code because some of libraries used in this project has license that requires either purchase of commercial license or making code open source. He replied within few minutes that he'll be able to connect remotely within next 10 minutes. He was trying to make it work for the next hour but he succeeded. It was night before deadline so I wrapped everything up and went to bed thinking that it won't take me more than an hour to get this new PC up and running in the office. Boy was I wrong.
Also, curious about his code, I've checked source and he is using beautiful ponglish (mixed Polish and English) with mistakes he couldn't even bother to fix. For people from Poland, here's an example:
TerminarzeController.DeleteTerminarzShematyDlaLekarza
Part 3
So I drove to Kalisz and started working on making everything work. Almost everything was ready so after half an hour I was done. But I wanted to check twice if it's all good because driving so far second time would be a pain. So I started up Shitface's program, logged in, tried to open ANYTHING and... KABUM. UNHANDLED EXCEPTION. WTF. I checked trace and for fuck sake something was missing. Keep in mind that then I didn't know he's using some third party control for Windows Forms that needs to be installed on client PC. After next fifteen minutes of googling I've found a solution. I just had to install this third party software and everything will work. But... It had to be exactly this version and it was old. Very old. So old that producent already removed all traces of its existence from their web page and I couldn't find it anywhere. I tried installing never version and copying files from old PC but it didn't work. After few hours of searching for a solution I called Mr Shitface asking him for this control installation file. He told me that he has it but will be able to send it my way in the evening. Resigned I asked for this new PC to be left turned on and drove home. When he sent me necessary files I remotely installed them and everything started working correctly.
So, to sum it up. Searching for parts and building new PC, installing OS and all necessary software, updating everything and configuring it for Tom taste took me around what, 1/3 of time I spent on installing Mr Shitface's stupid program which Tom is not even happy with. Gotta say it was one of worst experiences I had in recent months. Hope I won't have to see this shit again.
Epilogue
Fortunately everything seems to work correctly. Tom hasn't called me yet with any problems. Mission accomplished. I wanna kill very specific someone. With. A. Spoon.1 -
Yesterday my father called me and asked if I'd have a look at his website to exchange his logo with a new one and make some string changes in the backend. Well, of course I did and hell am I glad I did it.
He had that page made a few years ago by some cousin of a friend who "is really good with computers", it's a small web shop for car parts and, as usual costumer accounts. Costumer Accounts with payment infos.
Now I've seen a lot of bad practices when it comes to handling passwords and I've surely done a few questionable things myself but this idiot took the cake. When a new account was registered his php script would read the login page, look for a specific comment and add a string "'account; password'," below into to a js array. In clear text. On the website. One doesn't even have to breach the db, it's just there, F12 and you got all the log ins.
Seriously, we really need a licensing system for devs, those were two or three years this shit was live, 53 accounts... Now I've gotta decipher this entire bowl of spaghetti just to see if he has done any more unspeakable things.4 -
TL;DR I'm fucking sick and tired of Devs cutting corners on security! Things can't be simply hidden a bit; security needs to be integral to your entire process and solution. Please learn from my story and be one of the good guys!
As I mentioned before my company used plain text passwords in a legacy app (was not allowed to fix it) and that we finally moved away from it. A big win! However not the end of our issues.
Those Idiot still use hardcoded passwords in code. A practice that almost resulted in a leak of the DB admin password when we had to publish a repo for deployment purposes. Luckily I didn't search and there is something like BFG repo cleaner.
I have tried to remedy this by providing a nice library to handle all kinds of config (easy config injection) and a default json file that is always ignored by git. Although this helped a lot they still remain idiots.
The first project in another language and boom hardcoded password. Dev said I'll just remove before going live. First of all I don't believe him. Second of all I asked from history? "No a commit will be good enough..."
Last week we had to fix a leak of copyrighted contend.
How did this happen you ask? Well the secure upload field was not used because they thought that the normal one was good enough. "It's fine as long the URL to the file is not published. Besides now we can also use it to upload files that need to be published here"
This is so fucking stupid on so many levels. NEVER MIX SECURE AND INSECURE CONTENT it is confusing and hard to maintain. Hiding behind a URL that thousands of people have access to is also not going to work. We have the proof now...
Will they learn? Maybe for a short while but I remain sceptic. I hope a few DevrRanters do!7 -
Man in the event of some newcomers to the development game, those that will mostly work in the web domain or sys admins that are in training I want to offer some small advice:
Do not neglect vim
I know it might be a bitch to use at first. And I will never use it as a replacement to vs code. But fuuuuuck me I cannot count the number of times that vim wizardry has helped me when dealing with servers when dealing on a machine with windows and nothing but putty.
The thing is a lifesaver yo, and it makes for an impressive show when doing something in front of senior executives.
Learn it, love it, live by it
And exit is :q, save is :w, to copy and paste is :v then surround the text and then y to yank it and p to paste it.
:vsplit and :split are your friends and to move around splits is ctrl w and direction.
Good luck my friends. Stay classy.9 -
I tried writing this rant before, but I was (and still am) in too good of a mood so it was lengthy, meandering, and over-specific. so I'll summarize(ish).
summary:
* miscommunication
* working weekends
* incompetence and/or screwy integrations
summary of the summary:
* I can't fix someone else's mess if you don't talk to me!
Summary^3: #TODO: learn telepathy
Shortened rant:
Bossman at work signed up a very lucrative client by promising them something he couldn't deliver because he misunderstood and miscommunicated scope -- anti-fraud, if you've been following my rants.
Their signup (all four...) are screwy and cause issues and nobody knows why. I didn't write the code, have barely even glanced through it, and it uses a third-party (Clover) that's rather screwy.
Bossman has been asking me to do various things concerning the merchant, but has never been around to provide specifics, so I'm left to guess. I've done my best, but due to the aforementioned screwiness, I really have no idea what's going on. I just sort of muddled my way through.
Bossman also asked me, super late on Friday night (after 8:30pm), to rename one of the merchants because there are two with the same name (with different Clover creds, etc.) and that's just confusing. I didn't see the message because late and tired, and he didn't follow up or text/call me until two days later (today, Sunday). I also thought these were strictly for diagnosing and were de-listed. I had no idea the merchant was live and people were actually purchasing things for it. Had I known this I would have freaked out and demanded specifics on Thursday/Friday because wtf? debugging in production? with broken merchants? selling things for real money? scary bad? hello?
Anyway, I didn't see his message until he texted me about it at like 5pm today while I was about 2 hours from my computer. He's understandably frustrated, and I totally don't blame him, but fuck, miscommunication is a serious problem in this company, and that's amazing because it's so freaking small.
But the short version is that I'm likely going to get blamed for all this, Clover screwiness included. Bossman and I set up a call for 10am tomorrow and I'm positive he's going to try pinning it on me. Totally not going to let him, but his social is lv16+ while mine's like. 2 or 3. 😕 I'll see how it goes.
Really though, I should read @rutee07's book and just roast these fuckers.3 -
I watched today one of our devs working in Windows with a Docker Environment.
I think I'm pretty insensitive regarding pain, horror and morbid stuff.
But damn. I really needed to turn off the stream or else I'd walk to the company and rip his fucking workstation out of the server rack to put it out of his misery...
Errors? ignore them....
Weird python messages? Ignore them...
wild copy pasta between notepad++ containing shell commands and a git bash... Per mouse context. Yes. Move the cursor, mark the text, right click, copy, go to terminal, right click, paste.
Understanding of whats happening. Zero. Like literal zero.
He was wondering why there were strange characters when he pasted log output in a text file...
My question: How do you think colored text works in a terminal environment?
was answered by : "Don't know, never thought about it. But don't think this has something to do with the weird characters?"
I don't wanna talk about the rest.
Retarded humanity can please kindly kill itself so the intelligent above average nice people can live in peace...
The meeting was 2 hours. I drank 5 bottles of beer after it in1 hour and I'm please to announce I'm forgetting large parts of what has happened.
Cheers.8 -
Chrome, Firefox, and yes even you Opera, Falkon, Midori and Luakit. We need to talk, and all readers should grab a seat and prepare for some reality checks when their favorite web browsers are in this list.
I've tried literally all of them, in search for a lightweight (read: not ridiculously bloated) web browser. None of them fit the bill.
Yes Midori, you get a couple of bonus points for being the most lightweight. Luakit however.. as much as I like vim in my terminal, I do not want it in a graphical application. Not to mention that just like all the others you just use webkit2gtk, and therefore are just as bloated as all the others. Lightweight my ass! But programmable with Lua, woo! Not like Selenium, Chrome headless, ... does that for any browser. And that's it for the unique features as far as I'm concerned. One is slow, single-threaded and lightweight-ish (Midori) and another has vim keybindings in an application that shouldn't (Luakit).
Pretty much all of them use webkit2gtk as their engine, and pretty much all of them launch a separate process for each tab. People say this is more secure, but I have serious doubts about that. You're still running all these processes as the same user, and they all have full access to the X server they run under (this is also a criticism against user separation on a single X session in general). The only thing it protects against is a website crashing the browser, where only that tab and its process would go down. Which.. you know.. should a webpage even be able to do that?
But what annoys me the most is the sheer amount of memory that all of these take. With all due respect all of you browsers, I am not quite prepared to give 8 fucking gigabytes - half the memory in this whole box! - just for a dozen or so tabs. I shouldn't have to move my web browser to another lesser used 16GB box, just to prevent this one from going into fucking swap from a dozen tabs. And before someone has a go at the add-ons, there's 4 installed and that's it. None of them are even close to this complete and utter memory clusterfuck. It's the process separation. Each process consumes half a GB of memory, and there's around a dozen of them in a usual browsing session. THAT is the real problem. And I want to get rid of it.
Browsers are at their pinnacle of fucked up in my opinion, literally to the point where I'm seriously considering elinks. Being a sysadmin, I already live my daily life in terminals anyway. As such I also do have resources. But because of that I also associate every process with its cost to run it, in terms of resources required. Web browsers are easily at the top of the list.
I want to put 8GB into perspective. You can store nearly 2 entire DVD movies in that memory. However media players used to play them (such as SMPlayer) obviously don't do that. They use 60-80MB on average to play the whole movie. They also require far less processing power than YouTube in a web browser does, even when you download that exact same video with youtube-dl (either streamed within the media player or externally). That is what an application should be.
Let's talk a bit about these "complicated" websites as well. I hate to break it to you framework web devs, but you're a dime a dozen. The competition is high between web devs for that exact reason. And websites are not complicated. The document itself is plain old HTML, yes even if your framework converts to it in the background. That's the skeleton of your document, where I would draw a parallel with documents in office suites that are more or less written in XML. CSS.. oh yes, markup. Embolden that shit, yes please! And JavaScript.. oh yes, that pile of shit that's been designed in half a day, and has a framework called fucking isEven (which does exactly what it says on the tin, modulo 2 be damned). Fancy some macros in your text editor? Yes, same shit, different pile.
Imagine your text editor being as bloated as a web browser. Imagine it being prone to crashing tabs like a web browser. Imagine it being so ridiculously slow to get anything done in your productivity suite. But it's just the usual with web browsers, isn't it? Maybe Gopher wasn't such a bad idea after all... Oh and give me another update where I have to restart the browser when I commit the heinous act of opening another tab, just because you had to update your fucking CA certs again. Yes please!23 -
! exactly dev
I'd ditched Windows and spent a while exploring the Linux ecosystem for content creation. And I have to say, it was not a nice experience.
As much as I respect the Linux mantra of "free as in freedom" and "you need to roll up your sleeves and figure out stuff on your own", it just isn't good enough for non-dev work. Sorry guys, but I need software that gets out of my way and at least does what it's supposed to do. I can't stand a horrible UI or delays and random crashes, which is exactly what happens with most things under Linux.
To replace my Windows workflow I used the following:
1. Windows -> elementaryOS (because Debian/Ubuntu repositories seem to have the best software support, and elementaryOS is the least horrible looking thing that supports that) and then Arch, because, well, Arch.
2. Blender + Maya -> Blender + Maya on Linux.
3. Reaper + FL Studio -> Ardour + LMMS.
4. Photoshop -> GIMP + Krita + Inkscape.
5. ZBrush -> nothing :(
As you can see, my use cases are pretty much all over the spectrum.
Firstly, installing and configuring stuff. A pleasure on Windows, an absolute pain on Linux. Everything just worked on Windows, I had to wrestle with library versions and patches and unstable audio layers (Linux audio just sucks, except for JACK) on Linux.
Out of these, Blender and Maya were the best experience. But even then, both would suffer from random crashes that just didn't happen on Windows.
Ardour is actually really nice when it works. Its use of JACK for routing makes it really really flexible, but it just isn't stable enough to depend on. LMMS is utter crap. I'm sorry, but I just hate the UI. Can't stand it.
GIMP, Krita, and Inkscape can't beat Photoshop, even when you consider them together. Adobe software workflow is just so much better and more intuitive.
Blender 3D sculpting is not bad, but it's nowhere as good as ZBrush.
Also, if you're a C++ dev like me, nothing beats Visual Studio 2017. Nothing. That IDE just blows everything else out of the water. Even VSCode. And it's not slow at all, it handled a fairly large project (PBRTv3) just fine on my Windows development VM. Yes, a VM.
So...I ditched Linux and went back to Windows, but I keep Linux as a VM for when I actually want to mess with Blender or Ardour. Or some dev stuff which Windows sucks at (which is becoming less frequent because of WSL).
Out of all the above, the only one I'd consider ready for production use would be Blender. Developers of open source software, please learn from Blender. Kickass UI and user friendly operation is extremely important, you can't make a random window with GTK buttons and text boxes and arcane config files and expect people to use it for serious work.
Also, Windows beats Linux hands down as an everyday OS. It's always been rock solid, if you take care of it properly (and that goes for any OS). Updates hardly take any time because I run it on a SSD. As for all the advertising and marketing bullshit, you can block a large amount of stuff. And for what can't be blocked, well, I just have to live with it, because the alternative is compromising on my creative output, which is too much for me.
I still run Linux on my server, though. And on my embedded devices (Pi, BeagleBone, etc.). It absolutely rocks there.
I realize that Linux software is not going to improve unless we do something about it, so I'll be contributing fixes and code (the joys of being a C++ dev, yay). Still, I feel that the platform and software as a whole is just not mature enough.18 -
I've been so pissed off so many times, I thought I should divide them into categories.
- Pissed off at a fellow dev: I told him to use a constant instead of a hardcoded number.
He changed this: obj.method(3);
to this:
public static final int three = 3;
obj.method(three);
- Pissed off at management: I once got a $10 yearly raise.
- Pissed off at a client: They rejected our design proposal because the text was in spanish and they didn't speak spanish. It was lorem ipsum text.
- Pissed off at code: I once had to refactor a 500 line legacy jsp script with HTML, CSS, JS and Java completely intertwined.
- Pissed off at Twitter: They changed their API the day of our go-live, breaking all of their widgets, forcing us to move the go-live date and making me work an additional 8 hours after a week with almost no breaks.
- Pissed off at travel and logistics: They sent me to a hotel in Mexico City 2.5 hours away from the client's office.
Fun times...1 -
So I setup a nice csv file for the customer to fill in the shop items for their webshop, you know? with a nice layout like
name - language - description etc.
(just temporary, because the legacy website is going under a ((sadly frontend only)) rework, so it now also has to display different 'kind' of products... and because the new cms isn't done yet they
have to provide the data with other means)
my thoughts were to create a little import script to write the file into the database.... keep in mind of the relations... etc...
guess what? TWO MONTHS later, I get a file with a custom layout, empty cells, sometimes with actual data, sometimes (in red / green text color) notes for me
I mean WHY.... WHY DO YOU MAKE MY LIVE HARDER???
So now I have to put data in 6 columns and 411 rows in the database BY HAND...
oh and did I mention they also have relations? yeah... I also have to do that by hand now...3 -
Took client's site live and enthusiastically encouraged them to write original content...
Very first page published was literally a slash and paste of an entire wikipedia entry with inline links still in the text. -
The problem I have with atom, vscode, sublime, and notepad++ is that none are available on the command line over SSH, inside tmux. And that's where I do the vast majority of my text editing.
The first text editor I used on the command line was pico, the technological successor of which is nano. I used it because when I was in college in the late '90s, we used pine for our email, and pico was the default editor for pine.
When I got my first job out of college in 2000, I found out about vi, and very quickly fell in love with it, and its technological successor: vim.
The only reason I've never gotten into emacs is because I've never wanted for more than vi/vim. And also because as a system administrator, I'm logging into dozens, of not hundreds of servers a day. While vi or vim is guaranteed to be on all of them, emacs is not.
So, for me, the use of a desktop text editor like the ones I mentioned at the beginning of this post, just doesn't make sense to me. I almost never edit files that live on the computer where I'm sitting, and I'm not interested in doing a commit/push every single time I want to rerun a script.20 -
So, giving a talk soon and marketing wanted to see the slides.
Comments come back. On every slide that is purely visual they've suggested I add a title and a para or two of text.
Fuck you and your fucking slideuments. If you want them to read the material send them a memo and save me the fucking trip.
Or even better, turn up yourselves and read lists of bulletpoints off the screen for 30 mins while I sit in hotel hot-tub with a cocktail.
I hate the inanity of corporate life.
Next time I'm going to send you a blank slide and live draw my diagrams. See how you like that, arseholes.4 -
These are the things that finally finally helped me stick to learning programming.
Hello world! This is my first story on devrant and I would like to share how I finally overcame the barriers that had always prevent me from learning programming in a more serious and structured way.
I know my way around linux, had some experience with BASIC many years ago and have more than basic notions of cryptography... however I never got myself to learn programming in such a way that I could write an app or interact with an API. Until now.
I have advanced more than ever before and I believe it might be thanks to these aspects:
1. C#
I have always had struggles with languages that were too compact or used many exotic or cryptic expressions. However I have found C# to be much more readable and easier to understand.
2. Visual Studio
My previous attempts at learning programming were without an IDE. Little did I know what I was missing!
For example when I tried learning python on Debian, I almost went crazy executing programs and trying to find the compile errors in a standard text editor.
Intellisense has been live changing as it allows me to detect errors almost immediately and also to experiment. I'm not afraid to try things out as I know the IDE will point out any errors.
3. .NET library and huge amounts of documentation
It was really really nice to find out how many well documented classes I had available to make my learning process much easier, not having to worry about the little details and instead being able to focus on my program's logic.
4. Strong typing
Call me weird, but I believe that restricting implicit conversions has helped learn more about objects, their types and how they relate to each other.
I guess I should be called a C# fanboy at this point, but I owe it to that language to be where I'm now, writing my first apps.
I also know very very little about other languages and would love to hear if you know about languages that provide a similar experience.
Also, what has helped you when you first started out?
Thanks!!5 -
I gotta say, I actually admire the work that content creators must go thru to make quality content.
So as I stated before I’m working on YouTube channel, under the name “TheSoftwareSage” ... to create tutorials and a way of me teaching software the way I believe it should be taught, not how the mainstream methods of today are.
Bottom up approach rather than top down
(Must start with a firm understanding of the foundation.. and build upon the knowledge as we go thru the layers of abstraction but the key concepts must be understood first)
Anyway, I’m working on this in my spare time and I was not aware of how much effort I would actually need todo this right haha. At first I figured I’d just screencast a monitor and have a ppt or text editor or terminal open and that stuff and just do it.
As In person with my interns I never have “planned” lessons or content is all impromptu based on the need at the time and I just go with it, with their computers and a whiteboard lol.
I was wrong for video recording lol... maybe it’s OCD... or perfectionism, I’ll make a video, review it like 5times and then be like shit I forgot to mention this or that or I didn’t like how I explained this or that
OR
I keep worrying too much about colors, and sound levels and quality and transitions and video angles and all this other shit.
And then post editing fuck.... I’m about ready to say fuck it and “do it live .. one shot” and just upload the end result.
I guess this would be in the content world similar to our “paralysis analysis” notion.10 -
At a previous job, boss & owner of company would waste hours of my time to show me, at his own desk, every small detail of some random feature he had fallen in love with on some random webpage he found, while saying "I don't want to disrupt your plans or anything, this is just something to keep in the back of your minds, as this would be a really nice thing to have, even tho none of the clients have asked for this and I have asked no one else for a second opinion, and I will most likely ask you to remove this feature in the future because I will finally have realized it wasn't that good an idea anyway."
Ok dipshit, what the fuck are we supposed to do with this information? Every week from this moment on you will ask whether we have found the time to implement this feature, even though you are fully aware that our schedule has no room for random, unplanned features and that we are already not able to meet the unreasonable deadline you pulled out of your ass two weeks into a development process that would end up taking 8+ months.
We are already overworked, we already work hours upon hours of unpaid overtime, and yet you still think it reasonable to pull us away from our work every other fucking day to talk about random extra features you want added, but don't want added to the roadmap because you want no delays... Fuck you, fuck your toxic attitude, fuck your meetings where you spend half an hour complaining about features we are still in the process of developing the backend functionality for (on test servers) not having the right font colour for the text, and fuck your legacy desktop software originally written in COBOL that you now want moved to "the cloud".
I would rather be unemployed and live as a hobo on the streets with a "will code for food" sign than work for you ever again. -
Holy retarded internet company. The fiber cable that comes from the power pole lost its connection to the building I live in. So the fiber was laying on the ground in the parking lot. The upside is it is still working. The problem is people are going to run over the fiber and break it. So I sent an email to the ISP on Thursday. They didn't create a ticket all day on Friday. By the time I got home they were not open. I called their tech support number and pressed 0 until I got a real person. I explained they need to fix this soon or it will get broken. They said "I understand" and then proceeded to create a ticket for fucking wednesday next week! I told them it will damaged by then. They said "I understand". Then I get a text saying they will do this wednesday. No you stupid fuckers, you do not understand!
Queue the McGuiver music:
I got out some steel wire I use to fix stupid shit like this. I made a hook to connect the steel cable holding the fiber. This hook will go around some exposed electrical conduit. Then I got a board to lift it up high (no ladder and 5 inches thick of ice on ground). I cannot balance wire hook on board and get it to slip down. So I got a steel pole I have and attached another hook with electrical tape. As I passed the hook over the conduit I used other pole to grab bottom of hook and pull it down to keep a hold of the conduit. Now the fiber is up in the air again above the parking lot. I hope this stupid hack works until wednesday. My right arm hurts like hell cause the strain of holding the fiber taut while I pulled the hook down. It strained my right hand.
Worst customer service on the planet with Century Stink. They fucking make it harder than hell to get help and it seems they take almost a week to fix shit.4 -
This always gets me:
Developers complaining that their 4 year old / cheap ass computer is slow.
Get. A. New. One.
It's not that hard.
Here, let me do one for you:
https://computeruniverse.net/en/...
I just went to a site that delivers across Europe, and selected a cheap laptop with a decent CPU and SSD. Short on RAM, sure, and without a Windows License. But you can buy RAM for an additional 50$, and that brings you to a total of 550€, delivery included. And it will WORK. And it will be fast.
It's too expensive?
No, not exactly. Wherever you are in the world, if you can code decently, good enough to have the right to complain about development tools, you are eligible to at least 10$ per hour income as a freelancer across the globe. I've had such opportunities offered to me by many organizations, especially non-profit ones that need cheap employees. I actually was offered more but let's stick to 10$ per hour.
So that's 1600$ per month. Enough to buy 3 such laptops. Oh, taxes, I forgot. So you get 2 laptops. Wait! You need food and everything else. Well if you're in a country where that offer actually makes sense, then it's likely that you can live off of 400$ per month quite well. Maybe 800$ if you need to pay rent.
So that's roughly 1 month of work for a laptop that will make you not waste time on waiting for stuff.
Sweet! 1 Month! What does it get me?
Well assuming that you have no laptop, it gets you A JOB that pays you 1600$ per month.
But if you DO have a laptop, you can sell it for cheap, and benefit from the following:
1. Boot-up time from 30-60 seconds to 10 seconds.
2. Installing software - from 1 minute to 10 seconds.
3. Opening a browser - from 10 seconds to 1 second.
4. Opening an advanced text editor (Atom, VS.Code) - from 10 seconds to 1 second.
5. Searching for a file on your entire hard drive - from 1 hour to 2 minutes.
....
You get the point. Waiting is reduced by several times.
So how much do you really wait when coding?
Well are you compiling? Are you opening a new project and the IDE needs to re-index the files? Are you opening programs like a terminal emulator, browser and such? Are you using virtual machines for dev environments?
Well all of these processes become several times faster. Depending on how often you do it, you'll be saving yourself from 1 hour per day to upto 4 hours per day (my case, where a HDD would be just out of the question).
How much is that time worth? At least 10$ per day. If you're working for 20 days per month, 240 days per year, that's a total of 2400$. And for the life time of that crappy laptop of 2 years, that's 4800$ saved. And that's with hugely conservative numbers. Nobody pays 10$ per hour any more, except if you've just started in the industry. I know because I've been there.
Please, for all that's sacred to you, justify right here, right now, HOW THE FUCK can you not afford to get that 8GB of RAM, that cheap ass SSD for 100$, or even a brand new laptop (hey! it's even portable and has FHD graphics on it!) for 550$.
That's why every time I hear someone who is a professional developer complain that they don't have money for a decent machine, I have to ask: why the fuck are you wasting yours and everyone else's time?!10 -
So I work in a web development company in my town and have been doing a while or heap of parallax sites for our clients. Now obviously when we do the designs we get them in and get them to play around with the site before we go ahead and push their new site out and make it live right.
Wellll who would of thought that a simple parallax site would be so hard to use for the general user??? Recently we have been getting the occasional call where the client is getting complaints about the site only being a big ole image or just one block of text. After investigating why their site was broken or why the users weren't able to see the whole site I came across no problems at all.
Today I got a call from the client who instructed me that after explaining to one of his own clients that he had to scroll down the page that everything was just fine!
I mean, what? How do you miss the big ole scroll bar on ya screen or even think to even attempt to scroll? Some people aye lmao2 -
FUCK EVERY PAGE THAT DOES NOT STRIP CLEAR TEXT INPUTS LIKE EMAIL AND USERNAME.
FFS WE LIVE IN A TIME WHERE YOU JUST HAVE TO APPEND ".strip()" TO ACHIEVE THAT2 -
Years ago I was working in local cinema as a student job from time to time and used to sleep after shifts at my uncle's. Uncle did not had internet but there were so many wlans all around. Since I had nothing to do for hours after shift, I downloaded Backtrack linux at home, made live dvd of it and saved a two articles of "how to hack wifi" to text files.
It took me 4 hours to break WEP, since I was total lame, and it was the only one WEP around. They also had mac restrictions set to router, so I changed my mac address to one of their devices, logged in to router and added our mac address. For my uncle it was complete magic but since he is total geek to linux he liked it.
Fast forward weeks later. When I came to my uncle's house he was downloading like ton of linux distributions. Literally each one. Gigabytes of data. I told him not to do so because sooner or later neighbour will notice, but he did not care. Guess what, he notices, probably slow internet and (maybe) bigger bills, I do not know, but owner just changed protocol to WPA2, not changing password. So the story continued for almost 2 years. Felt a bit sorry for neighbour but did not expect such an outcome. I just wanted to watch youtube videos and scroll social networks, keeping low profile so no one notice.1 -
TL;DR fuck stupid people
I had to develop a rather simple Android app. It had to scan a qr code and let the user validate an invitation based on that code.
It had 2 fucking screens, one for statistics, one for the scan.
One week before going live
Product owner: The app is too complicated.
Dev/me: What?😶
PO: I want you to get rid of the statistics screen. Also make the text and buttons bigger. Also keep in mind we might want it back after.
Needless to say the app looks like shit with the exagerated font size.
At least it's so idiot proof that even a monkey could use it.😂1 -
Today's shit list, compiled from multiple random apps:
* Your subscription renews without an email in advance (no time to cancel)
* Your chat bot asks me twenty questions about why I want to cancel my membership, then sends me to a live agent, who asks me the same damn questions.
* Your app emails me my password in plain text
* Meeting agenda squashed by execs:
"We don't talk about _____, but we're committed to transparency." -
How are Coding Bootcamps and what are they like?
A little background:
I’ve been going to a University (have a year left for a CS degree) and I am so EXTREMELY frustrated. I thought I would get an education but it’s so underwhelming. 95% of it doesn’t involve programming and the classes that do are so elementary that I know more than the professors. By the end of my web design course we had been taught to center text, insert images, insert links, and how to use tables with a single day on CSS using colors.
The OOP courses are all the same, learn variables, types, conditionals, loops, classes, functions, and so forth. Python, C++, and Java. I taught all this to myself when I was 15, I’m 29 now.
I’ve recently gotten extremely interested into full stack web development. .NET Core, React, Typescript. I’m also working with Electron. I’m basically 100% self taught and spend almost every waking moment trying to learn more and apply it.
There’s only one person at my school who has the same passion as me and he’s the president at the coding club but is going into machine learning and big data (I’m the Secretary) and I just wish I could interact with more people who have the same passion. I would love to be challenged. I feel as if I spend more time trying to learn and diagnose problems then applying my knowledge because web development is so complicated when it comes to connecting everything together and I’m still relatively new to it (started like 4 months ago). I’m an extremely fast learner and extremely dedicated so I’m not worried about that being an issue.
I just really want to be a part of a community where I have people who can answer my questions and I don’t have to spend hours or days on google finding a solution to integrating Webpack or using typescript with react, and more. I want to feel challenged.
Can I get this from a boot camp? I recently listened to a podcast from Syntax and it really excited me but I don’t want to be let down again. Either way I’m finishing my degree to get that bullshit $60000 piece of paper but I wouldn’t mind taking a couple months off for something like this if it’s worth it.
I live in CO so if you have any Bootcamps in CO that you recommend, I’d love to hear it and take a trip to check it out in person.
Thanks a bunch!10 -
Oh god where do I start!?
In my current role I've had horrific experiences with management and higher ups.
The first time I knew it would be a problem: I was on a Java project that was due to go live within the month. The devs and PM on the project were all due to move on at the end. I was sitting next to the PM, and overheard him saying "we'll implement [important key feature] in hypercare"... I blew my top at him, then had my managers come and see if I was OK.
That particular project overran with me and the permanent devs having to implement the core features of the app for 6mo after everyone else had left.
I've had to be the bearer of bad news a lot.
I work now and then with the CTO, my worst with her:
We had implemented a prototype for the CEO of a sister company, he was chuffed with it. She said something like "why is it not on brand" - there was no brand, so I winged it and used a common design pattern that the CEO had suggested he would like with the sister company's colours and logo. The CTO said something like "the problem is we have wilful amateurs designing..." wilful amateurs. Having worked in web design since I was 12 I'm better than a wilful amateur, that one cut deep.
I've had loads with PMs recently, they basically go:
PM: we need this obscure set up.
Me & team: why not use common sense set up.
PM: I don't care, just do obscure set up.
The most recent was they wanted £250k infrastructure for something that was being done on an AWS TC2.small.
Also recently, and in another direction:
PM: we want this mobile app deploying to our internal MDM.
Us: we don't know what the hell it is, what is it!?
PM: it's [megacorp]'s survey filler app that adds survey results into their core cloud platform
Us: fair enough, we don't like writing form fillers, let us have a look at it.
*queue MITM plain text login, private company data being stored in plain text at /sdcard/ on android.
Us: really sorry guys, this is in no way secure.
Pm: *in a huff now because I took a dump on his doorstep*
I'll think of more when I can. -
This is why you don't hire your son's friend to build your company's website. From a live (new) customer site that needs to be rewritten:
<h2><span class="wsite-text wsite-headline">
<font size="6"><font size="5"><font size="4"><font size="3"><font size="4"><font size="5"><font size="6"><font size="7"><font size="7"><font size="7"><font size="7"><font size="7"></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font><strong><font color="#e4e3f1" size="7">***REDACTED TITLE***</font></strong>
</span></h2>7 -
!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!"10 -
I work and live in Italy, if any of you know Italian, you'll probably know there are a few words with accents and also a few locations with accents in their names.
There was this big client for which we built a CMS and the were to insert the names of the vendors of their network, for each vendor there also was the address.
There were SO many addresses with accents and they just couldn't write capital letters with accents, so in the end, I had to make a function to capitalize everything including accents in the CMS.
I know i could have just used the text-transform:uppercase directive in CSS, but... whatever, they kept paying a shitload of money -
(Questions below.) At this point I probably just whine about job search in IT w/o much commitment. It's because I don't learn stuff from interviews and have no willingness to prepare for primitive questions from HR's book. You know, stuff like: "What was your experience on previous jobs and why you quited them?" and "What are your advantages and cons?"
Even though I see them a bit discriminatory. I barely find words and make them audible alrite, and so rush to the stack questions. I answer 50% of them in average, 20% ideally. As a result, I get no conclusive offer. Fair... probably not. Doesn't matter.
All of a sudden, idea chimed in to make a personal website with all of the frequent questions answered in advance. At last, I've got some time to make the decent replacement of the CV into a landing page that communicates my professional and emotional ability to headhunters.
TL;DR: I wanna make my personal website portfolio and I need your word about the following.
1) Can I make up for the absence of my own live projects with OSS commitments or other smooth talk?
2) Is there a merit in answering the common interview questions right off the bat in written form?
3) So, I already prepared 4 conclusive theses with thoughtput choice of words, that I wanna place as a grid in first scrolling section. I call it "Principles", but perhaps there is a synonym to this one or it's good as it is?
4) I don't want to represent myself as a blunt set of "features". How do I transite into explaining the usage of my stack in these circumstances? Less text better, right?7 -
Eavesdropping by phone's microphone and speech recognition to serve targetted ads by Google? Anyone here had a feeling this happened to them or knows is this already a thing?
Happened to me on my Android phone multiple times over last year on different subjects, that I was talking live with a person, for example how someone had eyelid surgery (my phone was locked in my pocket the whole time and I didn't google search what that is, or made any text input into device whatsoever) and couple minutes later an ad came on my phone for exactly something we were discussing before. Weird coincedence or something more? 🤔9 -
Visual studio code
I usually use IDEs and am in love with everything made by Jetbrains. I am also to lazy to setup dual boot on my pc, so I live with windows 10. After one of the recent downgrades Microsoft distribute, they shipped this lightweight text editor called visual studio code with it.
It lied to me, that it's a good editor for coding C. It even tells me that I can compile and execute the code from inside the editor, similar to vim. I went to the settings and found a dark theme, for the best best feature this "editor"has to offer.
I give it a try by opening a source file with a normal double click. Editor gets focused, but the code is nowhere to be seen. Retrying conforms my, that this piece of shit is literally not able to open files UNLESS you drag and drop them into the editor. HOW FUCKING USELESS IS THAT?
Next I want to compile the program. Guess what, that functionality was not given or at least I could not find it (same goes with the manual)
Even with dark theme it burns my eyes to use this editor. There are almost no useful shortcuts. The functionality is not even comparable to vim. I always thought eclipse was bad, until this shit was installed.
It might work well for other people. Maybe it has functions, that just don't work on my pc, but from what I've seen: visual studio in general and especially that editor feels like Microsoft trying to replace the toolet paper with sandpaper.8 -
!rant
TL;DR: New(-ish) dev looking for advice to improve workflow and new languages. Hopefully worth a read though :)
Newbie developer here, I took a web applications development class this year since I could take that at another campus rather than do general education courses at my home school, and I have learned and earned a CIW Certification for HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript, though I know the certificates do squat if I can't apply myself to them, and I have learned PHP and MySQL.
I want to learn more, technically-applicable languages.
My setup is barebones (to a Linux diehard's eyes), with a gaming laptop that I do a lot of workstation stuff on, an RPi 3 B that I do some Linux-y stuff on, and a less-powerful Development Laptop (that I call a devtop) that I occasionally do work away from home on.
I'm sure most will cringe and weep at my workflow, as I use Windows 10 on both systems and the standard NOOBS software on the pi, and I use Brackets as my text editor, as well as the XAMPP AMP stack for testing.
My biggest questions are what could I do to improve my workflow, and what languages should I learn/apply myself to for real-world application (such as Node.js for live-updating server-side applications or C# for Windows applications)?
Thank you for taking the time to read this, any feedback is helpful! I'm just a high school student with a lot of enthusiasm for development!6 -
Random thoughts on more out of the box tools/environments.
Subject: Pharo
Some time ago I had shown one of my coworkers about Pharo and he quickly got the main idea behind it but mentioned how he didn't like the idea of leaving behind his text editor to deal with source code.
Some time last week I showed the dude some cool 3d animations you can do with Pharo while simultaneously manipulating the code to change them in real time. Now that caught his attention particularly and he decided he wanted to know more about the language but in particular the benefits of fucking around with an image based environment rather than a file based.
Both of us reached the conclusion that image based makes file based dev enviroments seem quaint in comparison, but estimated that it was nothing more than a sentiment rather than a fact.
We then considered what could be the advantage/disadvantages of such environments but I couldn't come up with anything other than the system not having something like Vim or VS Code or whatever which people love, but that it makes up for it with some of the craziest IDE tools I had ever seen. Plugins in this case act like source code repos that you can download and activate into your workflow in what feels something similar to VS Code being extended via plugins written in JS, and since the GUI is maleable as it is(because everything is basically just subsets of morp h windows) then extending functionality becomes so intuitive that its funny
Whereas with Emacs(for example) you have to really grind your gears with Elisp or Vimscript in Vim etc etc, with Pharo your plugin system is basicall you just adding classes that will convert your OS looking IDE into something else.
Because of how light the vm machine is, portability is a non issue, and passing pharo programs arround is not like installing Java in which you need the JVM.
Source code versioning, very important, already integrated into every live environment and can be extended to do pushes through simple key bindings with no hassle.
I dunno, I just feel that the tool is too good to be true. I keep trying to push limits into it but thus far I have found: data visualization and image modeling to work fine, web development with Teapot to be a cakewalk and work fine, therr are even packages for Arduino development.
I think its biggest con would be the image based system, but would really need to look into how this is bad by any reason other than "aww man I want vim!" since apparently some psychos already made Emacs and VS code packages for interfacing with Pharo source trees.
Embedded is certainly out of the question for any real project since its garbage collected and not the most performant cookie in the jar.
For Data science I can see some future, seems just as intuitive and interesting as a Jupyter Notebook actually, but the process can't and will not be the same since I still don't know of a way to save playground snippets unless you literally create classes for it, in which case every model you build gets saved inside of an object, sounds possible but, strange since it is not a the most common workflow in jupyter.
Some of the environment is sometimes glitchy, but it does have continuos development and have not found many hassles.
There is a biased factor from my side: I seem to be wired to understand the syntax and simple object model better than in other languages. To me this feels natural as if I was just writing ideas rather than code, mostly because I feel that there really ain't much in terms of syntax, the language gets out of my way and the IDE feels like the most intuitive environment in the world to me. I can see why some people would find it REALLY weird of counterintuitive tho.
Guess I really am a simple dude. -
So, I browse to a video livestream and an annoying ad starts before the livestream is shown. Furthermore, the page jumps around because of a cookie notification that also blocks some UI elements at the top.
Note: this is the website of a public (government-paid) national news website with very high standards and a good reputation.
Action 1: refresh page; I hope the ad is skipped. Nope, annoying ad restarts. Page jumps around again because of the cookie notification.
Action 2: accept cookies to remove notification blocking the top UI (it's OK, I know it can't actually save any cookies on my machine). Instead of some nice JS doing it for me in the background, the page refreshes because you know, HTTP requests and whatnot.
Annoying ad restarts again... FML 🤬
Lessons to be learned from this for any web dev: these annoyances can and *will* exponentially get worse if used simultaneously against your users, instead of being used to help or inform your users.
As a user of you website, I want to watch a livestream. I don't care what stupid legislation forced you to shove a fucking cookie notification in my face. Make sure it is not annoying me to the point that I close you website and take minutes to rant about it!
Also, give me the freedom of choice to watch an ad or not. You and I both know that some ads simply are not for me. Better save yourself and myself the bandwidth.
And go get good at web development. You're a news site. That's more than just text and images. If you want great apps, social media coverage, videos, live streams, blogs, etc. go get some better web devs. Your current web frontend devs only qualify to get fired.1 -
fuck it, tell me straight.
Can i live into this tech world with poor math skills and no interest in web dev and designing?
my experience as native mobile dev was enjoyable and still is, but i fear that this is not a very broad career choice.
You see their is blockchain, dapps , hybrid apps, webapps, server designing, tensorflow models and Ai models( though they can be integrated with native apps too i guess ) , and many more tech and therefore jobs that rely on knowing about the webdev. and all i know is how to make a decent native java app.
and why the fuck should i join this web dev cult? its such a fucking mess. 8 different types of text sizes sizes, <b> and <strong> being the same thing, do you know about a thing called abstraction? My android studio would give me fucking murder warnings if i even dared to introduce hard coded texts along with code. and here, an html page is basically text + attributes? fucking kill me.3 -
I have this little problem,
there is no constant electricity In the country where I live, in fact for the past 4 days there was not a single blink.
I enable auto save on my vs code to save me from tears,
now I have a file server with backup batteries and since it's a laptop mobo that was converted to a server, hooking up the battery was a no brainer.
I just saved copies of my files on it and if I edited any of them I'll just overwrite the file. this was only possible if I did this before the power goes out or else I am stuck again.
I decided to try vs code extensions that will save me from all that copy and paste work.
tried ssh, unsupported architecture error, didn't care I just needed ftp or sftp
I tried the simple ftp/sftp extension. worked pretty well. allowed me to connect to the server and add the remote directory to my workspace and with autosave the changes are uploaded immediately which means once power is out I can continue on my mobile phone(I have some android text editors that support ftp).
little problem. I discovered some things just don't work. even if I opened the whole directory, the contents will not be loaded unless I open them up like stylesheets and images and whatnot.
imagine having to open every single damn file before it appears on the browser, very annoying.
I need a solution, I have really tried.7 -
The positive side of EnvVars...
So a couple of weeks ago I moved all api keys and db passwords to environmental variables on the server so that I didn't have to keep worrying if I'm live in my test environment.
Earlier I shat myself after an apt-get upgrade broke php and apache somehow decided it's a great idea to serve all .php files as plain text. I was super relieved to find no confidential information (apart from logic) was made public. -
vim...no GUI for Windows for vimRC?? Seriously? gvim is fine as a gui but I want a gui to configure vimrc. Give me sliders and drop down boxes with live visable updates to see what it does right away with common vim options that saves to my vimrc. You know, like a edit ->preferences dialog box with tabs and scroll bars etc that updates the config file for vim directly?
Since there are many here that use it I'd figure sure I'll try it. I used it many years ago for some basics stuff but you've all shown me it can outdo my current note tab++ but holy hell if it isn't shit to configure and set it all up!
I'm not interested in using another editor besides vim after seeing the features now and not interested in a emulator or simulator for vim in another editor (like sublime).
Why don't you just....X? Because. Reasons. I like my GUIs and hate editing text config files then restarting to see what changed. Show me right away dammit...is this a pipedream or does such an app exist?
I'm not looking for a gui for vim...gvim does that just fine, but rather a gui edit preferences options dialog window for vim config file vimrc. Sigh...
Am I dreaming that such an app exists??9 -
TLDR;
Side project update.
Made simple nlp library in python and published it’s first version to open source.
Now I can feed it with parsed pdf text.
See rant https://devrant.com/rants/2192388/...
Why ?
Cause during reading book about nltk I couldn’t find simple extendible way to provide support for polish language and I wanted to abstract stemming, word normalization, tokenizer etc. so I can provide ex. different conditions for separate text files and don’t write much code what is an asset when you work solo.
It’s about 12GB of pdf public accessible law data I am trying to handle ( at first ) which is about 35000 files from last 90 years.
So far I automated downloading web pages and pdf documents from them. Extracting data from web pages and saving it to database. Extracting text from pdf files. I have about 5-6 projects to do all of it above maybe at the end I will put it to some workflow manager like Luigi or just run it by cronjob.
First thing for website version 1.0 part is find correlation between all documents inside law text using nlp library by building custom conditions. Then just generate directory structure and html files with links between documents.
Website version 2.0 is already in my mind but it will be creepy to make it and will take at least 1-2 months and I want to publish fast.
I have some pdfs with only images instead of text and tesseract worked quite good with them so maybe I will try to process them when everything go live.
Learned a lot about pdf as now I know that font in pdf is not always providing unicode characters ( stupid form of obfuscation) so when you extract text you need to build glyph vector to text map for every font.
Pdf is full vector representation - just like svg - what is logic if you think a bit and know that some printers are running using postscript.
Let’s hope next update will be about flutter mobile app which started all of shit above. It’s almost ready ( except getting data from api I am trying to do and logo for release version ). It’s last piece of puzzle.3 -
We're in the last stretch before going Live next week.
A training session was held with some of the future users.
"Why does that dossierID field is mandatory with a lot of validation rules? We don't use that info, we just remember the names."
"Why do we have this feature to manage x info that is linked with one of our services? We only needed a text field for custom values"1 -
I once was working on my family's business during summer and was doing something on the laptop that was there (according to the owner, it was in a "good shape" - oh my god that laptop nearly gave me cancer: an old Toshiba, running W10, with half the F keys not working - specially F5. I CAN'T LIVE WITHOUT F5 OH MY GOD -, and also the ➡ key (arrow keys). It was bought in a flea market and some IT guy, a friend of the owner, repaired it a bit and installed the OS because a laptop that old ran WinXP or Win Vista for sure) when suddenly it died on me.
I rebooted the thing and right before the time it should be showing the windows logo, the screen froze (on a black screen with some text) and it started to beep. Loudly. A loud continuous beep. I turned it off and on some times after that, seeing if turning it off and on did something (as it seems to work LoL) and it continued with the beeping. After a quick search I found out that that was a common problem with Toshibas that old, and that I needed to press F2 (that key worked thank god) when the black screen with the text showed up (I don't remember what was written there, it were some booting instructions, I think).
It worked. Great. Now the N key doesn't work when I press it. Greeeeeeeaaaaaat. Also it seemed that, when I opened the start menu, it would automatically write "nnnnnnnn(...)" without me pressing any key (pressing any key would make it stop though, maybe it was stuck).
Then I told the owner not to turn it off, because the laptop would start beeping and such (and I know he'd panic about it).
From then on I think it went off for good and now he's been using his own Toshiba, that runs Vista and is slow as all hell.
Moral of the story: he should have been used his crappy PC from the beginning, at least all its keys work
(Note: watching him type hurts my soul. When one is used to use both hands to type, and is fast-ish on the keyboard and uses tabs to change fields, watching someone type with only one hand every 2" or so and using the mouse to change fields hurts. So much time wasted 😭) -
first some background. I'm an intern coming in on the end of my internship (tomorrow's my last day). I've been working on a reasonably important project, more specifically a restful API. We have automation set up so that any commits to master on GitHub are pushed out into a live, accessible version. Some guy (let's call him dumbass) joined our team last week, and has had a few ideas
Dumbass: *opens pull request to my repo*
My boss: *requests changes*
Me: *requests different changes*
(All this before even testing his code, mind you)
Dumbass: *makes requested changes*
Me: *approves changes*
A day passes
My boss: *approves changes*
Me (not even 10 seconds after my boss approved changes): *requests more changes*
(Still haven't tested his code, I just ran A PEP8 compliance test)
Dumbass: *MERGES CHANGES TO MASTER*
Literally EVERYTHING breaks because he was importing a module that's not available
We don't notice until later that day (I'm still working on writing the tests for the automation, for now changes get put on live version even if everything breaks -- tool is still in beta, so everyone working on it (a whole 3 people) knows to TEST THEIR SHIT BEFORE MERGING TO MASTER.)
WHY EVEN BOTHER WITH THE PULL REQUEST IF YOU WERE GOING TO MERGE TO MASTER YOURSELF ANYWAY??!??!??
My frustration cannot be properly conveyed through text, but let's just say this guy's been there a week, I already didn't like him, and then he fucking does this. -
!tech i don't understand how people makes any place a home?
I have an experience of living with my parents and that is a place where i feel belonging and safe, but i wonder why? like , in your home, you could be awake till 4 am and still sleep like a log. you won't have thoughts of strangers trying to murder you or rob you when you hear the slightest noise. (atleast not occasionally)
but this is not the case when you try to live alone. for eg , i would often call/text someone before sleep when i am staying in a hotel room. and if the hotel isn't a superior one (imagine those close, small rooms w in a broken up 2 star hotel in a quiet and unpopulated area), i would be sleeping with my eyes open, praying the night to get over
So an early conclusion can be this : a person would feel safe and carefree wherever they are with known people. in my home i got my parents. although its weird since they are neither physically nor financially powerful to deal with any stranger situation. But still, a home feels home. and a home feels safe.
maybe it's because of the the people around the home? so most people have neighbours, shops, parks, efc around their homes. some even have forests, police stations or other places in vicinity. so does that make an area safe to breathe ?
For our family, i don't know if that thing applies. our neighbours are crappy dummies who would rather have someone's home burning than coming for rescue, but fight to death if someone parks in their spot or ask them to fix something. If their is a robbery in our area, i would rather suspect one of those assheads to be the culprits than someone from outside.
however, knowing the fact that they know us makes me think that this is a considerable factor that add to the sense of safeness in an environment . i guess that's why even the verbal quarrels among neighbours are done in such a noisy manner.
So if someone is shifting to another location, say in a different city or even a different state, they should spend first few days befriending every neighborhood person? that would be a weird approach. i have seen a few shiftings in my area and the new people rarely try to come into attention. even the people who get shifter on temporary basis (i.e the rent based pg/tenents etc), are always silent.
so how exactly does anyone make a new house, their comfortable and safe 'home' ?13 -
Relatively often the OpenLDAP server (slapd) behaves a bit strange.
While it is little bit slow (I didn't do a benchmark but Active Directory seemed to be a bit faster but has other quirks is Windows only) with a small amount of users it's fine. slapd is the reference implementation of the LDAP protocol and I didn't expect it to be much better.
Some years ago slapd migrated to a different configuration style - instead of a configuration file and a required restart after every change made, it now uses an additional database for "live" configuration which also allows the deployment of multiple servers with the same configuration (I guess this is nice for larger setups). Many documentations online do not reflect the new configuration and so using the new configuration style requires some knowledge of LDAP itself.
It is possible to revert to the old file based method but the possibility might be removed by any future version - and restarts may take a little bit longer. So I guess, don't do that?
To access the configuration over the network (only using the command line on the server to edit the configuration is sometimes a bit... annoying) an additional internal user has to be created in the configuration database (while working on the local machine as root you are authenticated over a unix domain socket). I mean, I had to creat an administration user during the installation of the service but apparently this only for the main database...
The password in the configuration can be hashed as usual - but strangely it does only accept hashes of some passwords (a hashed version of "123456" is accepted but not hashes of different password, I mean what the...?) so I have to use a single plaintext password... (secure password hashing works for normal user and normal admin accounts).
But even worse are the default logging options: By default (atleast on Debian) the log level is set to DEBUG. Additionally if slapd detects optimization opportunities it writes them to the logs - at least once per connection, if not per query. Together with an application that did alot of connections and queries (this was not intendet and got fixed later) THIS RESULTED IN 32 GB LOG FILES IN ≤ 24 HOURS! - enough to fill up the disk and to crash other services (lessons learned: add more monitoring, monitoring, and monitoring and /var/log should be an extra partition). I mean logging optimization hints is certainly nice - it runs faster now (again, I did not do any benchmarks) - but ther verbosity was way too high.
The worst parts are the error messages: When entering a query string with a syntax errors, slapd returns the error code 80 without any additional text - the documentation reveals SO MUCH BETTER meaning: "other error", THIS IS SO HELPFULL... In the end I was able to find the reason why the input was rejected but in my experience the most error messages are little bit more precise.2 -
Does anybody here still use dreamweaver? I used to use it a lot back in the day when I started as a designer, but haven't used it in years, but I noticed the app in our companies adobe subscription plan and have installed it.
Given that we live in an age of VS Code, sublime text and so one, I'm just wondering does anyone still use DW and if so what is it good at?2 -
Anyone have any info about unconventional ways to inject JavaScript into an external website? I'm trying to become more knowledgeable about security vulnerabilities in the web apps I build and I've been having a lot of fun trying this stuff out in other live sites haha. I've tried adding js code to text boxes, input fields, and the uri but nothing has been successful. I read something about modifying cookies I think...6
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Hi there, my 2 cents to rant on WWDC :)
- Check time? My big head is in the way.
- Work tabs... Why is my Wordle in the list?
- Edit message ... Good bye iMessage memes :(
- Dictation. Hello Jarvis. Hi CIA. Sup 0-day devs
- Live Text. Indian tutorials are now just a copy paste away
- Wallet keys sharing through messages 🤌
- Family. Send more screen time through messages (goodness this messaging app is becoming less green)
- Shared libraries in photos, lovely, now your aunt knows you love visit and taking photos of the neighbor (if you forget to turn it off)
- CarPlay, this will need screen time soon, ui so beautiful you gonna plan a journey by tinkering with the dials
- Check time (part 2) on the iwatch, My big head is still in the way
- Fitness app, Sleep app, Health app, Medication app, mmm lovely but still cant put my confidence in AI
- M2, saw it coming. Spec: scaringly powerful.
- isnt the midnight MacBook air elite?! But the notch tho. Magsafe is back, more thin, this thing looks fragile.
- Did they show a game running lower than the videos fps on purpose? Hmmm
- Ventura's stage manager, xbmc vibes
- Is that Facetime attachment free? Is there a subscription to continuity camera?
- Tab Group Collaboration, hehe, "they can see which tabs you're looking at" hehehe
- Free Form: bloatware
Meh, I cant rant more, honestly the new features look good.1 -
Story Time.
I used to live in a hostel meant for professionals with two strangers in 2017, back when my salary was way too low to rent a flat on my own.
One afternoon I was just sitting around and looked at my contacts list which were about 50-60 people in total.
I started selecting people whom I hadn't spoken to for more than 6 months, and it was almost all of them except 2-3 people which were my brother, mom and dad.
Then I hit the delete button, I guess out of anger or me feeling lonely at the time. I wanted to see who remembers me or tries to reach out, given that I don't have their number.
And all these years later, it's still 2 people who I have in my phone contacts list. My mom and dad.
Since then, I am super exclusive to adding anyone's phone number to my list. I usually save their contact and start a chat on Whatsapp and delete their contact after for 6 months or more. When someone does text, I read their previous chat to remember who they are.
People come and go, but a corner of my mind wishes for that person who makes it into the list.
I kinda feel a little broken as I am typing this, but idk it might be the loneliness kicking in, idk. It is what it is.4 -
9 Ways to Improve Your Website in 2020
Online customers are very picky these days. Plenty of quality sites and services tend to spoil them. Without leaving their homes, they can carefully probe your company and only then decide whether to deal with you or not. The first thing customers will look at is your website, so everything should be ideal there.
Not everyone succeeds in doing things perfectly well from the first try. For websites, this fact is particularly true. Besides, it is never too late to improve something and make it even better.
In this article, you will find the best recommendations on how to get a great website and win the hearts of online visitors.
Take care of security
It is unacceptable if customers who are looking for information or a product on your site find themselves infected with malware. Take measures to protect your site and visitors from new viruses, data breaches, and spam.
Take care of the SSL certificate. It should be monitored and updated if necessary.
Be sure to install all security updates for your CMS. A lot of sites get hacked through vulnerable plugins. Try to reduce their number and update regularly too.
Ride it quick
Webpage loading speed is what the visitor will notice right from the start. The war for milliseconds just begins. Speeding up a site is not so difficult. The first thing you can do is apply the old proven image compression. If that is not enough, work on caching or simplify your JavaScript and CSS code. Using CDN is another good advice.
Choose a quality hosting provider
In many respects, both the security and the speed of the website depend on your hosting provider. Do not get lost selecting the hosting provider. Other users share their experience with different providers on numerous discussion boards.
Content is king
Content is everything for the site. Content is blood, heart, brain, and soul of the website and it should be useful, interesting and concise. Selling texts are good, but do not chase only the number of clicks. An interesting article or useful instruction will increase customer loyalty, even if such content does not call to action.
Communication
Broadcasting should not be one-way. Make a convenient feedback form where your visitors do not have to fill out a million fields before sending a message. Do not forget about the phone, and what is even better, add online chat with a chatbot and\or live support reps.
Refrain from unpleasant surprises
Please mind, self-starting videos, especially with sound may irritate a lot of visitors and increase the bounce rate. The same is true about popups and sliders.
Next, do not be afraid of white space. Often site owners are literally obsessed with the desire to fill all the free space on the page with menus, banners and other stuff. Experiments with colors and fonts are rarely justified. Successful designs are usually brilliantly simple: white background + black text.
Mobile first
With such a dynamic pace of life, it is important to always keep up with trends, and the future belongs to mobile devices. We have already passed that line and mobile devices generate more traffic than desktop computers. This tendency will only increase, so adapt the layout and mind the mobile first and progressive advancement concepts.
Site navigation
Your visitors should be your priority. Use human-oriented terms and concepts to build navigation instead of search engine oriented phrases.
Do not let your visitors get stuck on your site. Always provide access to other pages, but be sure to mention which particular page will be opened so that the visitor understands exactly where and why he goes.
Technical audit
The site can be compared to a house - you always need to monitor the performance of all systems, and there is always a need to fix or improve something. Therefore, a technical audit of any project should be carried out regularly. It is always better if you are the first to notice the problem, and not your visitors or search engines.
As part of the audit, an analysis is carried out on such items as:
● Checking robots.txt / sitemap.xml files
● Checking duplicates and technical pages
● Checking the use of canonical URLs
● Monitoring 404 error page and redirects
There are many tools that help you monitor your website performance and run regular audits.
Conclusion
I hope these tips will help your site become even better. If you have questions or want to share useful lifehacks, feel free to comment below.
Resources:
https://networkworld.com/article/...
https://webopedia.com/TERM/C/...
https://searchenginewatch.com/2019/...
https://macsecurity.net/view/...
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