/*
It's a pretty long rant. Hope you didn't get bored :P
*/
So I have this friend of mine who has learnt Python at good level (that's what he says) and is with me in all classes in college. I have worked with C, C++, C# and Java only and hated Python when it was taught (wk44).
So the following happened in the last 2 weeks:
Once he wrote a Python function in terminal just returning a hard coded string (lame right) and will show me how cool is it and that it is sooo much easier.
Whenever we do a mini project together he will force that we use Python. Even in Image processing when everyone is ready to work on Matlab, he insists that Python would be a better option.
We asked that this XYZ is very easy to implement on Matlab.
We then had to listen about the large and great community of Python and that it has Libraries for everything and that it is the greatest programming language ever.
One day he saw my C# project for DFA and NFA simulation which was the greatest project I have "completed" myself, and went like "Hmph, if I was you, I would use python and make a more "professional" code" (then went on arguing as always)
This happened today in Networking lab-
(Sockets was taught and we are expected to learn its programming aspects)
All students: Open linuxhowtos.org and start reading on socket programming
He : Opens some websites and downloads books on Networking with Python or someting
Now while I am reading the documentation of sockets and bind, he opens spider IDE, copy-paste the code in the book and start bugging ME that he is getting all these errors like literally showing me those errors and whining about all those problems.
Me: We are supposed to learn this in C. Here take a look at this link.
HE: No I'll use Python cuz it is better than your C. It has libraries for everything and is much easier.
Me: Alright whatever I am fed up, do whatever you want

Mini rant ahead:

So just wanted to get something off of my chest in relation to something that continues to prop up constantly in the OSS community.

OSS is not better than proprietary software and proprietary software is not greater than OSS.

Sick of seeing people complain when they see someone using proprietary software like google chrome and the like in comparison to open source alternatives.

We understand that the freedom offered by OSS is clearly better but we should not 'hate' or 'actively avoid' proprietary software.

Key example for me personally is that I use Gamemaker Studio 2 to develop my games and the amount of people who keep negatively branding that choice and tell me to use Godot because it is 'better' and 'open source'

People just really need to respect other peoples choices, if you have something to say on the matter when you see someone using something you may not agree with, sure say your opinion, but don't defend it and go on the attack because other people use differently licensed software.

* And end scene *

Best swag ever: 3d printed dev rant avatar? I would love to have my mini-self on my desk! Or for playing board games! For rubberducking! In the fishtank! Oh man, inifinite posibilities ... *_* what would you guys do with one????

Can we please stop using a file structure (YAML, JSON, XML etc) and just changing the file extension and calling it a new file type?

Stop trying to make your software/framework sound more complicated by saying this shit, if you use something, own it and don't try to mask it...

And mini rant over...

:not-rant
A rare picture of a wild Sony Ericsson Xperia mini which runs Linux distribution

fml

All week working with sun outside and when you're supposed to enjoy the weekend the weather gods don't let you :/

I just installed Opera Mini on my PSP. That alone isn't very exciting on its own, although I am stoked that my website does in fact render on a device from 2009. With the helpful guidance of a laptop from 2004 that's doing the hotspot duties for this thing.

No, what really got me stoked is that Opera still supports these old platforms, and how small they managed to make it. The .jar file for Opera Mini 4.5 is ~800kB large. There's a .jad file as well but it's negligible in size and seems to be a signature of sorts.

Let that sink in for a moment. This entire web browser is 800kB. Firefox meanwhile consistently consumes 800 MEGABYTES.. in MEMORY. So then, I went to think for a moment, how on earth did they manage to cram an entire functioning web browser in 800kB? Hell, what makes up a web browser anyway?

The answer to that question I got to is as follows. You need an engine to render the web page you receive. You need a UI to make the browser look nice. And finally you need a certificate store to know which TLS certificates to trust. And while probably difficult to make, I think it should be possible to do in 800k. Seriously, think about it. How would you go *make* a web browser? Because I've already done that in the past.

Earlier I heard that you need graphics, audio, wasm, yada yada backends too.. no. Give your head a shake. Graphics are the responsibility of the graphics driver. A web browser shouldn't dabble with those at all. Audio, you connect to PulseAudio (in Linux at least) and you're done. Hell I don't even care about ALSA or OSS here. You just connect to the stuff that does that job for you. And WebAssembly.. God I could rant about that shit all day. How about making it a native application? Not like actual Assembly is used for BIOS and low-level drivers. And that we already have a better language for the more portable stuff called C.

Seriously, think about it. Opera - a reputable browser vendor - managed to do it in 800kB on a 12 year old device. Don't go full wank on your framework shit on the comments. And don't you fucking dare to tell me that there's more to it. They did it for crying out loud. Now you take a look at your shitpile for JS code and refactor that shit already. Thank you.

!rant

Last week I finished what I thought to be unpaid work experience working in IT (more like programming), at the end of it I had a meeting with the boss who offered me paid work next summer and also gifted me a £150 amazon voucher for the work I did.

I sold my XBOX (ew the unproductivity) and use the voucher to buy a Mac Mini. Going from Windows, Mac OS X is significantly better, I prefer bash to power-sh*t.

TLDR; I worked for 5 weeks and got a Mac

!rant what do you ranters do when you're not ranting or coding? Me? I work on cars. Car in the picture is my gf's mini.

#!/usr/bin/env python
# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-
from rant import depression as fuck
from WhiskeyBottle import *
import time

while bottle.contents > 0.0 and time.datetime():
fuck.rant()

Yeah ok, this will be one of a few, but I'll try to keep it short. Damn, whiskey is not helping. Nor various smokables.

So yeah, have you ever had a dream? I consider myself a gamer the whole life, always loved creative worlds, dynamics, mechanics, plots, stuff you could and couldn't do. To the point I promised myself I'd make a game - NAH - I'll be making games in the future. You know, good games, that you come back to. Like Doom. Or those porn games.

Never went to Uni or nothing. Was born in a poor European country with Internet more broken than my soul right now. Years later, after acquiring some good hardware, learning a bunch of languages, Unity, Unreal Engine 4 and experimenting for about 10 years now with small scripts, apps and mini-games I've come to this realization.

I only made one "full" "game" in my life, and that was when I was like 16 in Klik & Play (early Game Maker). And it was shit. It was horrible, horrible shit. It literally makes you want to cry when you play it. It's 16-bit brain cancer. And it's the best I've ever published.

Now I've been through countless prototypes, none of which I've developed any further. I had ideas, plans, even made some more advanced roadmaps and dev cycles. Estimated costs, time, mechanics, gameplay hooks.

I never finish anything.

I get bored. Frustrated sometimes. There's always an improvement, something that "if I'd finish that it would be it! Screw this thing I was working on now, THAT will be worth sacrificing it." It's tiresome. I'm getting old.

And honestly, I don't know how people do it anymore. Trying to compromise those side-projects (they take all my free time which is not much) and work is just... draining. I'm losing hope. Maybe I shouldn't be allowed into the gamedev world after all. Maybe I'll just pump half-assed pieces of crap everybody will hate.

Or worse, nobody will care.

Dear theme designers, unless you are designing an app specifically with OLED in mind... Do not use black as a main background colour.

It just looks horrible IMO, key example on good dark theme is the windows store and a example of horrible dark theming is the settings app.

And mini rant over.

devRant mini rant... Only myself to blame

I wear flannels all the time :( but don't have 1000

Thanks devRant for awesome content, I will get the flannels soon!

mini rant

So I finally started toying around C#.

As much as I tried to avoid it, as much as I wanted, well, sometimes there is need. I was laying it off and laying it off...

There are some things that well.. aren't my taste but whatever.

But come on why the fuck I cannot delete explicitly?

What do you mean "just assign it to null and GC will eventually kill off that instance"

No, I want that fucker to die here and right now. Like in good ol' C++.

!$rant

Hmm.. I kinda want to add a terminal type feature to my portfolio project that let's you type commands to navigate the site or change some options. I could still keep the standard navigation elements for the people who get mini heart attacks when they even see a terminal xD

!rant
<no trolls tag>

I suffer with anxiety.
I took pills (pristiq), but side effects almost ended with my marriage.
And now I'm having more problems. Even a message from my boss trigger me and I can't think properly.
I have a good job and small mini projects and I enjoy playing games

How do you deal with anxiety?

They should rename computer science at secondary school/a level to "recursion in action"... I really don't enjoy having to learn fundamentals again...

Was talking to a friend of mine and he was very expressive about companies (Especially tech companies) just wanting money...

Turned to him and said that wasn't true because if it was Motorola would make a gen 3 of the Moto 360...

(This is sort of a mini rant for me because they are too busy copying the iphone design instead of giving the people what they want and will earn them a shit tonne of money)

How do people work in coffee shops for the day but not lose their seat when they inevitably need the toilet?!

Keep buying coffee to stay in the shop causing me to pack up at least 3 times today and move to a different corner....

Mini-rant

Dear HR people, if you don't provide enough info about the positions that you have at hand forget about me wasting time on call-first acknowledgements to later on realize what kind of waste of time it was!

Sure, making business connections is important but without taking into consideration the other side time is all but respectful, in a professional context.

So, balance your shit and make the call worth the time of all the parties.

Fucking thanks.

You can really tell a lot about a coder from their build log. Especially the actual compile error reasons.

Yes, I'm talking about you who duct-tapes solutions for others to clean your mess up later when your hack falls apart , you dirty ba****d!

Multi-mini-rant time!

1. The Case of the Craptop

Someone wants me to fix their permadead battery, cut-up charger, and what amounts to a laptop held together with GUM... all with software. The charger is like 6 bends from snapping entirely, and requires fucking with. Hard drive is on last legs. Battery's like $50 on its own.
Fuck me...

2. The Fuckery Continues...

Wednesday, it's gonna be -30°F or worse with wind chill. School isn't closing. Normal temps are like 40°F rn, so it's not like it's usual weather or anything.
Fuck me. Again.

Ok so I switched from iPhone SE (1st gen) to iPhone 12 mini.

And no crashes in devRant so far...
With the old phone, it was crashing sporadically when I was opening a rant.

Makes me wonder if that info could help fixing the crashes.

So I have never done 'real' development on anything bar my current game engine Virgil, however found myself referring to C documentation for GLib and SDL2 rather than valadoc documentation.

Decided fuck it, I'm already converting everything to Vala's pointer syntax so I can have manual memory control, implementing stb_image and contemplating reworking SDL2_image into raw C so I'm not depending on extra libraries... Why do all this when I can just learn C and have more control.

Everything was going well and decided to buy the C programming language book, already knew about pointers and structs but ohhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh boi was I not ready for malloc .-.

!rant - Love the new pets but only shoulder birds show up in mini avatars on posts. Cats should be available on shoulders too. :) One of our team has a cat that walks on a harness, rides & sits on his shoulders around town and while he works.

!Rant
In place of my absent Debugging Rubber Duck, I'd like a Mini BB8 Unit Please.

So.. currently working on updating some hybrid mobile apps. Major updates, so requires drastic measures..

anyway, over in my Nx workspace now, I generate a new Angular app, add Capacitor and generate a new Android project.

Then when I open my new project in Android Studio, it recommends updating AGP from 8.0.0 to 8.1.1.

Waiting for the new packages to download, AS shows an orange warning message popup that reads "sync is taking an unusually long time", or something like that.

Software development from a third world country sucks donkey dick. Because I've "only" got a 20Mbps connection. 🤔

!rant

Any recomendation on a mini board/micro pc/chip etc, somenthing really small that can run linux and open a browser?? Just to connect my tv to it and be able to surf on the web, somenthing ligth, won't do any heavy stuff with it. Cheap if possible
Thank you!

I hate this crap and wish people would stop doing it. It makes my brain bleed and doesn't prevent any difficult to find bugs.

if (TERMINAL_COUNT <= index_thing)

English doesn't work that way, and I don't know about you but this crap is just awkward as hell. Sweet Jesus I wish there was less cargo cult programming in the world. Just because you saw something in a blog that convinced you that reverse comparisons is best doesn't mean it actually is. Use a damn static analysis tool to catch accidental assignments in expressions, don't twist my brain to interpret your weird phrasing of comparison operators. Some of your code reviewers may be dyslexic and have enough problems as it is.

And now for the mini-rant that I'm actually here for: You know what makes for difficult to find bugs? (Hint: It sure as hell isn't an assignment in an expression) Releasing an RTEMS semaphore you've never obtained. You'd think that would cause some kind of panic or assert failure but nope. Instead it causes... misaligned address exceptions? In statically allocated global memory? WTF??

what the f....

So I'm making some changes to my setup. I'm relieving my current router from its duties and retiring it as a mini PC for my desktop setup. And I got my hands on a Dell Optiplex that will become my new router.

Now, firstly, the Optiplex came w/o a wifi antenna. I booted it up into a LinuxMint install USB for the first time and didn't expect much from it, but to my surprise, I got a popup: "There are wifi networks available". At that spot there was also my Fenvi PCI wifi card's antenna of my current (soon-to-be-previous) PC and it was barely seeing any wifi, and there came Optiplex with NO antenna attached to it and it managed to maintain stronger and more stable signal. wtf....

Alright, it's Fenvi, it's chinese -- there's probably not much I should expect from it.

Then I hooked it up right next to my current router with an external USB wifi adapter having 4x6dBi antennas on it, serving as my current wifi AP. Trying out hostapd configs, searching for the right channels,... should I test it? Naah, it still doesn't have an antenna - it won't reach my laptop. Meeh, for shits and giggles! `hostapd -d /etc/hostapd/hostapd_custom.conf`, on my lappy `nmcli d wifi rescan; sleep 5; nmcli d wifi` and... wtf... To my surprise, the AP was there! A thick wall away, no antenna whatsoever, and I still could connect to that Optiplex AP and post this rant!

What magic is this??? I'm now a bit concerned about ordering an antenna for it - I'm worried it could either worsen the signal or make it so strong that it'll fry my brains overnight.

I've been working on this personal project for awhile, I showed some screenshots, then I showed some updates (which I promptly deleted cause it was plain ugly). A website aimed at the "not-so-seasoned" devs, and I've been at a creative plateau for about 3 days now. I try to do some front-end, when I like what I see, I take care of the corresponding server-side logic, but for some reason, I'm having "Developer's block" (is that even a thing?).
Every second that goes by I try to do something else none code related, but I can't shake thinking about the project, but once I switch back to it, fuckin crickets.

I'm not asking a question this time (for once lol), just a mini dev's block rant.

So here is a mini rant from an amateur/hobbyist developer (me).

Over the past week, I've taken on a project that is much larger than any other projects i've attempted to handle (steam trading bot). This meant that there would be logic flaws, weird bugs due to unexpected behavior from shitty web apis (and their poor documentation hmmmm).

Anyhow, fast forward a few days and the code is complete. It's mostly functional, apart from a few glitches and unexpected behavior here and there...or so i thought. Apparently if someone trades and item to me that isnt in my pricegrid, the bot freaks out and kills itself, relaunches, and repeats this cycle (pm2). And i only found out about this on my way to school

So in desperation to fix such a critical flaw in my code (if my bot breaks a lot and doesnt accept trades, i can get banned from backpack.tf), i bust out my only device which is my phone, and start editing away (JuiceSSH and turbo client is godsend ty). 30 minutes later, after toiling through code with no indentation or syntax highlights (mobile pls), ive fixed it. So i push to live and alls well.

Then I arrive at school, pull out my laptop and decided to check up on my code to see if anything needs fixing.

Oh look in one line i used '||' instead of '&&'.

ok lets fix it.

ok lets push to live again.

I launched WinSCP to move the files onto the server, and just as the loading bar finishes and the file is overwritten, i realized; FUCK the code i had on my laptop wasnt the latest version i just worked on on my phone.

So that's that. 30 minutes of typing code without indentation and syntax highlighting on a 5 inch screen and it's all gone.

TLDR:
Version control is a must.

working with Mapbox and so far everything works except displaying custom svg pointers for single points while clustering the multiples.
the documentation is only semi useful.
and my work-at-home coworker keeps meowing at me like that guy who wants to talk about TV shows whenever I'm working
I want a nap!

Arg! I'm ranting about the unofficial devrant extension nuuuuu!!!!!
I can't attach images, every time I click attach image and select the image, the notification box disappears and upon reopening, it's refreshed! Why bother with the link if it's gonna do dat!
Haxk20 wherever you are, heed my words!
(I felt guilty writing this mini rant)