ERRORs are red,
INFOs are blue.
My logs look pretty,
But not as pretty as-
Wait, hold on. Why are there ERRORs in here?
Why is the homepage returning a 5- oh crap.
Can you just... Can you give me a minute?

Toilets and race conditions!

A co-worker asked me what issues multi-threading and shared memory can have. So I explained him that stuff with the lock. He wasn't quite sure whether he got it.

Me: imagine you go to the toilet. You check whether there's enough toilet paper in the stall, and it is. BUT now someone else comes in, does business and uses up all paper. CPUs can do shit very fast, can't they? Yeah and now you're sitting on the bowl, and BAMM out of paper. This wouldn't have happened if you had locked the stall, right?

Him: yeah. And with a single thread?

Me: well if you're alone at home in your appartment, there's no reason to lock the door because there's nobody to interfere.

Him: ah, I see. And if I have two threads, but no shared memory, then it is as if my wife and me are at home with each a toilet of our own, then we don't need to lock either.

Me: exactly!

When I finished my studies, I was looking for a job and had an interview at a smallish company.

Boss: can you do C?
Me: yes, I have already done some stuff in C.
Boss: I mean, are you really good in C?
Me, growing suspicious: well yes I already have been using it - but anyway, there's also the project documentation for looking up, right?
Boss: uhm, the code IS the documentation.

I envisioned myself being drowned in undocumented spaghetti code and wasn't really keen on that job anymore, but my following question pretty much ended the interview:

Me: oh, I see. Do you have any roadmap for getting your development to a more professional base?

His looks, priceless! He was just shocked when he realised that he had failed my interview, and that I was a fresher made it even harder to digest for him.

Last year, my company sent me to India to coordinate stuff.
Me, to my wife: "They've chosen me because they trust my social skills."
Her: "OMG, what is the rest of the company like?!"

LOL.. :-)

I want to stop charging my e-scooter at around 85% because this will increase the battery life. To avoid always having to pull the plug at the right level, I made a stop circuit that goes between charging brick and e-scooter.

There's no processor involved, just a CMOS 555 used as inverting Schmitt Trigger which controls a power mosfet. Also two status LEDs and a start switch. The poti adjusts the cut-off level. Worked on first try, with only manual voltage and tolerance calculations beforehand!

Math: the imaginary unit is i.
Electrical engineering: no, it's j.
C hacker: hands off my loop variables!

So I have implemented all the features required for the current release. Carefully reviewed my code several times, but no testing.

Tester: everything passed green. Not sure whether you're a good dev or I'm a bad tester.

Me: let's call it a draw.

Duolingo is teaching me some really important sentences

Me, in the zone, staring at the code. Co-worker enters.
Co: hey, can you...
Me (not really listening): no.
Co: it's just...
Me: no.
Co: later?
Me: no.
Co: but...
Me: no.
Co: (leaving)

Trying to concentrate. Co-worker from another room standing there, BLA BLA BLA, and she's fucking LOUD. But she hates coldness, and it's below 0 °C outside.

So I open two windows, and guess who instantly leaves! Now it's cold, but SILENT. HAR HAR!

Fuck those useless calls!

PM: customer X wants a call in an hour.
Me: they didn't send emails before. No questions, no prep, no call.
PM: yeah but they want to talk.
Me: these unprepared calls are pointless. I'll be sitting there, noting down the questions and telling them I'll have to look up the details.
PM: shall I tell them that you don't want to talk to them?
Me: I don't care, it's your call, do whatever you want.
PM: that's not professional.
Me: oh you're calling it professional to sit there with a pencil, writing down crap or what?
PM: what's the problem?!
Me: I've had this shit for the last two fucking calls, and they were so unprepared that they wasted half of the call just reading up, and I'm fed up with this shit!
PM: but they are the customers, and they aren't that happy.
Me: yeah, and do you know why? Because our schedule is completely fucked up and our management has been ignoring ANY warning from engineering for WEEKS! That's why they are unhappy and not because I'm not holding their fucking hands!
PM: hey, but you can't tell me what I have to do!
Me: and you can't tell me either! [he's my PM, but technically not my superior.]
PM: so no call or what?
Me: you're free to have your call. I'll sort out the shit that they're concerned about, putting that down in a proper email, and then we have at least some basis for discussion!
PM: (left for his call)

Btw., my cursing was the same in the live conversation with him.

Me: You're looking rested - the vacation does you good, it seems.
Co-worker: I didn't have vacation?!
Me: but our PM does.
Co-worker: ...

Me teaching a co-worker programming.
Him:"So what exactly is the difference between Java and JavaScript?"
Me:"About the same as the difference between cars and carpets."
Thank you guys for teaching me how to answer that.

Attack is the best defence! I read my emails in the morning and figure out whether there's some action for me. When I go and get my second coffee, I drop by the PM's office and have a short chat with him.

Where I am in the projects, whether there's stuff from other tasks or unexpected actions, how long that might take, whether schedules are still OK, whether I need him to take care of some customer communication, these things. Usually less than 5 minutes.

The kicker is that he mostly doesn't interrupt me because I instead interrupt him - unless he is highly busy, in which case he just says "sorry, later", same as I would do.

It's a win-win because I can schedule the interruptions while he enjoys that he doesn't have to ask around.

!rant

So this year I had a subject at university called "Linux internal architecture", and for the last assignment I had to write a kernel module and interact with it with a separate program written in C.

Once I had finished and tested the driver, I went on to write the other program, which was supposed to use system calls to read and write data to the module. While debugging this program (~500 lines of code) I reached the level of frustration where you just start printing absurd messages everywhere in your code to see what's wrong. So for example instead of printing "This error happened in this function", my error messages were more like "Fuck this fucking function it doesn't fucking work".

Guess who forgot to delete all those messages before sending the code to the teacher...

Also, if a specific mode is selected, the program enters a while(1) that, apart from doing what it's expected to do, also creates a file in the user's home directory called something like 'motherfucker' and appends the words 'fuck this shit' to it. INFINITELY.

I really really hope this teacher doesn't try to run the program in his own computer, or he's in for a big surprise.

Meeting with American customers in Germany. One of them fetched a bottle of water with crown cap, but the opener was missing. She asked whether someone had an opener, so I got out a lighter and opened the bottle. Surprised looks.

My (Indian) PM: "That's a German thing, opening bottles with everything except bottle openers. Even with other bottles."

Customers were like, WTF?!

The bad thing today: I killed my laptop with coffee.

The good thing today: it was my company laptop, not my private one.

<!-- You shouldn't be able to read this -->

I get really tired of people shitting on php and getting greated with immediate laughter when I say I work as a full stack LEMP/LAMP dev. I work just as hard as you (ruby/python/node devs) do and feel like I make some pretty cool shit.

Why can't we all just agree we do great things with our tools and while I may use a different hammer than you, we still use the same nails!!!

Code review, here the simplified version. What the fuck has to be wrong with someone who seriously codes the first variant in production code?!

All my code is hacked together and barely works and is nowhere near shameless. But I'm pretty proud of my hardware hacks. Like the sticker that holds the casing on my laptop together.

Friday, I got a mail from my PM shortly before I wanted to leave. Basically it was, hey can you check out whether this issue [which I hadn't even heard about] is somehow related to our system? Meeting is in one hour.

My answer: I guess not, otherwise I'd have been in the loop much earlier than one hour before the meeting.

I shut down the PC like a boss and went into weekend.

So much swag arrived in the mail today.

It's funny how I end up paying for more stuff from a free app than from one of those freemium games that are so popular right now.

Office prank time! It was some years ago when the horror movie "The Grudge" came out, with that creepy Japanese dead girl who made that horrible "aaahhhhhh" sound. A coworker, who was just as shocked by the movie as I was, would occasionally send me emails with sceenshots from that movie.

One day, I upped it. I knew he was the first in the office in the morning, so I arrived even before him. It was still dark. I put a walkie-talkie under his desk, set it to "no beep", switched off the lights again and hid two rooms away.

Sure enough, he arrived. I waited for about 10 minutes to be sure he was sitting at his desk. Then I used my walkie-talkie and "aahhhhh".

WOAH, his scream was loud even two rooms away!

Linux: the weather applet in the panel displays the weather. When I open it, it displays more weather details.

Windows: the weather applet in the task bar displays the weather. When I open it, it displays random news and stock prices.

Microsoft can't even do a fucking weather applet right. Everything has to be an incoherent mess.

Stupid shitheads among the web designers, fucking listen up. Your fucking design is not the point of websites - the content is. You are not supposed to shove the content away to have your moron design shine in its purest debility.

Yeah I know, white space minimalism yadda yadda, clean interface - and you dumbasses just remove functionality to simulate a clean interface, to the point of using hamburger fuckups on desktop. Pull your heads out of your asses, that's not how to design an interface! Not to mention that you idiots still guzzle through the megabytes and dozens of domain lookups for your chickenshit minimalism.

While we're at it, not everyone is 20 years old like you youngsters - you won't believe it, but there is life beyond 40, and while such age is unthinkable to you because you are so dumb that you will hardly reach that age anyway, others on this planet have managed to get there. No 20/20 laser sight, you know.

Fuck you with your light grey thin fonts on white background because it looks "clean", it just SUCKS you wankers. Fuck you with your stupid ghost buttons that don't even look like a button. You know how to operate the shit you made, but reality check here, users spend most of their time on fucking other websites than on the abomination you have designed!

Get that into the shit bubble that you call your brain and read WCAG 2.1! That's not only for disabled people, but everyone will be able to use that shit better!

My dad has been using a Windows computer every day since 95. Yesterday he discovered that if you click the little tabs in the "details" view of the file explorer, you can sort the contents of a folder by name, date, etc.

I also tried to show him how to scroll with the mouse wheel, but he said it was too complicated, and he preferred to drag the scroll bar every single time.

The Linux circle:

For fucks sake, corporate IT has locked a database application for new entries because it will be phased out by the end of the year. However, the new application is not yet working.

The interim solution? An excel sheet on a shared network drive. In fucking 2020! Unbe-fucking-lievable!

*dad's w10 computer running super slow*

*checks task manager*

100% disk usage

*checks whatever-the-advanced-system-monitor-is-called*

*Compattelrunner.exe is at the top of the list in disk usage*

*searches online to find what the hell that is*

"Compattelrunner.exe collects program telemetry information if opted in to the Microsoft EatASackOfDicks Customer Experience Fuckup"

Telemetry is supposed to be disabled on this computer.

What the fuck Microsoft, if you want to straight out lie to my face as a customer at least try to not be so obvious that you basically lock down my computer with your telemetry shit.

Holy shit, I'm really impressed with the high tech park my dentist has. She takes pictures of a tooth, a computer makes a 3D model out of that, then she grinds down the tooth as necessary and takes pictures again.

From the difference, the computer generates the data for the tooth crown, including warning spots where it could be too thin so that a bit more grinding is needed.

Then she corrects some spots manually and sends it over to the CNC machine in the next room that cuts the thing from a ceramics block with correct colour. Some heat treatment later, and the tooth crown fits perfectly.

Gone are the days with dental imprints, provisional crown and not quite fitting final crown.

Just found another forum message from someone that doesn't understand Java and JavaScript. They said JavaScript is the code that Java runs....I thought we fixed these people.

When doing an open source project and users ask for an iOS version:

Fuck you idiots at medium.com for your sheer impudence. Not only that you track me, which I havn't agreed to, you think it's a good idea to nag around and gather even more data!
You stinking farts label your stalking as "let's make things official"! Who shit in your head?
I've seen other places way more often, and guess what, no coffee bar has ever had the idea to ask for my ID card just because I bought my second or third coffee there.
But just because it's the internet you think it's OK to be intrusive wankers, yeah?! Fuck off.

WTF - I discovered that wasps listen to me!

Earlier when one came in, I tried to catch it with a glass and release it, or kill it if that wasn't feasible. This year, I tried pointing to the window and ordering "get out!" just because I was too lazy to take action. Of course, I didn't expect it to work, but it did. I thought it was only a coincidence, so I kept trying it. It works every single time!

Crazy shit!

Duolingo has some secret plans for world domination

I have a whatsapp group with my friends, none of which are techies. A while ago one of them was looking for a phone to buy, so he started looking at models, specs and all that, but got pretty confused and asked a pretty well-informed question to the group:

"Guys, what is that quad core thing?
And what is a RAM? Is it something like the processor of the phone or what? "

OK, pretty typical stuff up until this point. The guy knows nothing about this sort of things, I wouldn't criticize him or insult him or anything like that. No, that's not the problem. The problem is the person that responded to him. This... This melted my brain so much I will never forget:

"Don't worry about that, you only have to look at how many gigahertz does the processor run at. Don't worry about the number of cores or ram. The GHz are the result of the amount of ram and cores, so the more the gigahertz, the better the phone."

PD: "Also take a look at how many megapixels does the camera have if you want to take photos".

Some people just talk out of their ass and pretend like they're experts on any topic they've read about for 5 minutes on the Internet

Me at QA, talking about a nasty bug I found in legacy code.
QA: what was the root cause?
Me: pos code.
QA: pos?!
Me: piece o' shit.
QA: ...

Arsch has a big security hole! In fact, a backdoor.

Continuation of the story with Linux Mint 20 Cinnamon on the old Core2 Duo with 2 GB RAM and HDD. The guy has had that PC under Linux for 1.5 months now, had never had Linux before, has no IT background, and is over 70.

Upon visit, I checked how the machine was doing. OK, he had forgotten to apply the updates, so I highlighted paying attention to the red icon in the tray. Launched the updates, all ran through.

Otherwise, he had managed to install Skype all by himself (network effect because of his family...) and had bought a webcam plus a microphone. Linux had just recognised everything without any fuzz. Even his Skype buddies were impressed, he said.

On top of that, he likes how much faster that PC is compared to his much more current Win 10 laptop and actually uses the old Linux PC more than the laptop.

He also enjoys that Linux doesn't do weird things all by itself all the time. That's not his experience with Win 10.

Damn, credit cards are so fucking secure these days that you hardly can BUY shit with them!
I need some special electronics that I only can get from a vendor in the US, which is overseas. Click click, buy, done. Well no, credit card refused. WTF? Click retry link. No, still refused. FUCK.
Called up the 24/7 hotline of my CC company. Oh yeah, that got blocked by the security system, somehow. We disable that for 20 minutes, just retry. Clicked retry link at the vendor. No failure mail. Hmmm, too good to be true?! Called up the electronics vendor. Yeah should work, stuff is in the warehouse stage. 40 minutes later: credit card declined. FUCK.
Called up the CC company again. Ok, disable blocker for one hour. Nice advice from them, tell the vendor it's only 45 minutes so that there's some buffer. Clicked retry link at the vendor and called them up to make sure that they retry before the time runs out.
LO AND BEHOLD, I could finally pay the shit!!

Hey Arch folks, real devs use Ubuntu!

I'm doing code review. Unsure about the deadline, I ask my co-worker:
Me: "Guess I'm half through, when do I have to be done?"
Co-worker: "Well if you're half through, you are already half done."
Me: "No shit, Sherlock."

LOL

I'm now typing clean code. [1]
And it shows - the code really looks better. [2]
.
.
.
.
[1] I cleaned my keyboard by removing every single key and wiping it with alcohol.
[2] After I bought a new monitor, that is.

Does anyone else feel this way? Especially with no formal training?

Intel: our new 12th gen CPU beats Ryzen in gaming!
Also Intel: benchmarks on a buggy version of Windows 11 that takes a big performance hit on Ryzen.

Yeah, Intel... you and your benchmarks. It's just so ridiculous.

A few months ago I was working on a (totally underpaid project) where my friend and I had to basically rewrite the entire program our client was using.

So we started planning and wrote all sorts of documentation to show the client our ideas for the new flow of the program, the new structure of the GUI and a few more details of what would the inner workings of the new app. He seemed to like all those ideas and gave us the green light to go through with the project and start coding.

We spent a couple of months coding, redoing the front end from scratch (with a different framework even, so I couldn't reuse any code from the old version) and completely redesigning the back end so it would be better, faster, more scalable etc etc etc. During this process, we obviously showed the progress of the app to our client, explaining everything we had been doing, and he seemed to like every new version we showed him.

When we were in one of the last stages in development (basically sending versions of the app to the client for evaluation), the guy suddenly changed his mind. After agreeing on everything we had been showing him over the last months, he sent an email saying:

"...the new system makes the app too complicated. I want this program to be as simple to use as possible; so we should revert the "Policy" system to essentially what it was in the last major version. The only change I want to make is [...] and everything else is essentially the same as the last Policy system."

So basically he wanted us to FUCKING UNDO EVERYTHING WE HAD DONE AND REVERT THE FUCKING PROGRAM TO THE FUCKING VERSION HE HAD BEFORE HIRING US!!!! WHAT THE FUCK????

YOU WANTED US TO CHANGE YOUR APP AND THEN YOU SUDDENLY CHANGE YOUR MIND AFTER 3 FUCKING MONTHS WHEN THE PROCESS IS DONE???

GO FIND A SWORDFISH TO FUCK YOU IN THE ASS, IM NOT WORKING FOR YOU ANYMORE

God, it feels good to let that out.

The Windows 11 keynote was such a load of bullshit. All the emo yadda yadda. You know, when I work on Windows, what I feel is irritation, anger, and despise for the amateur shitshow that Microsoft delivers.

In particular, but not limited to the fucking update reboots where Windows sits there uselessly and shells fucking prawns in its own ass!

Oh we now have semi-transparent shit. That's progress! It's so great! Only that it's not because already Windows Vista had Aero Glass, and Windows 8 removed it.

But we we have fucking rounded corners now! Crazy shit, some intern at Microsoft discovered border-radius, or did they dig out some fucking Windows XP copy? That also had rounded corners way before Apple even invented them!

To top it off, Microsoft even failed to deliver the livestream seamlessly and recommended watching it at Twitter. Yeah, that's the fucking "Windows experience" as we know it, you clowns!

My favourite BS quote from Nadella himself: "the web itself was born and grew up on Windows." That guy is so full of shit that an unmaintained latrine in rural India would be envious!

At a festival where I was with my GF from back then, I asked her whether it was OK if I drank some more, which she was fine with, but she didn't get the implication.

Later in the tent, when I was totally drunken, she turned me around and wanted some action. The sudden movement didn't go well, I was just able to open the tent, vomited out of the tent, and turned around to continue sleeping.

Apple you drove of delusional suckers! When will your retarded fashion devices finally support WEBP?!

A gallery page with images, and thanks to WEBP, it's 408 kB. Because Google made WEBP and handed out a well documented CLI FOSS compression tool that even can convert the source PNGs to lossy WEBP with bloody transparency. Well done, Google!

Except that Apple's shitty management can't take it that Google actually made something nice, so no WEBP. Instead, JPEG-2000 that enjoys nearly no fucking tool support. The free tools that even can deal with that mostly don't support transparency, and the encoder sucks donkeys so that JPEG still fucks JPEG-2000 big time.

So it's JPEG with matching background for iOS. Fine, but since JPEG's blocky artifacts are much more visible, the compression can't be that high, and it's 769 kB. That's 88% more image data for Shittari than for non-retarded browsers and even Edge! EDGE!!

Oh and if the user changes light/dark system mode according to surrounding light conditions, guess what happens? Yep, since JPEG doesn't support transparency, now it's different JPEGs with dark background via the media query in the "picture" element, and it's another 754 kB download. Bloody 1523 kB instead of 408 kB, that's a factor of 3.7!

Fuck your ass Crapple, with an electric eel!

That moment when your marketing manager makes technology decisions for your project and says "let's just use WordPress" ...

Ah well, it's double out of fashion because smoking is on the black list of the health maniacs, and nobody smokes pipes anyway. BUT! filling a pipe and smoking it for easily half an hour is quite some pleasure!

How do you call a ridiculous protocol?

Protolol!

When I learnt programming, sugar was still made out of salt and hence not used in coffee.

Also, we didn't have source level debuggers, only the "print" method. However, compiling was also slow. It was faster and more convenient to go through the program and execute the statements in one's head. This helped understanding what code is doing just by reading it. It also kept people from trial and error programming, something that some people fall for when they resort to single step debugging in order to understand what their own code is even doing.

Compiling was slow because computers in general were slow, like single digit MHz. That enforced programming efficient code. It's also why we learnt about big Oh notation already at school. Starting with manual resource management helped to get a feeling for what's going on under the hood.

Xmas party, held at an external location. After some drinks, a co-worker whom I was friends with started flirting up one of the waitresses. Now, he was tall, well-trained, and quite attractive for women. It was just that he also was married and had a child.

I quietly sought out that waitress and told her about that, asking her to turn him down because nothing good would come out of that. She appreciated it and stayed out of his way.

Felt kind of back-stabbing him, but at the same time, also saving his ass from himself.

Oh, nice. Now Windows 11 doesn't just fuck up AMD CPUs with lack of performance, but also SSDs. NTFS at its finest, but see the tags.

The Vivaldi team: open source is cool. It gave us Chromium to fork from, that's more than 90% of "our" code base!

Question to the Vivaldi team: then why don't you open source your Vivaldi code?

The Vivaldi team: uhm, when it comes to our browser, open source isn't cool because we fear someone might fork it. We need to protect ourselves from that possibility.

On an afternoon the day before delivery, we discovered a crashing bug. At around 2 AM, we had found the cause and fixed it. A short sleep at home, then back to office at 8 AM because the delivery was 200 devices containing that software, and they had to be updated manually because production had put in the old image.

We seized all available computers, even those from marketing who were... surprised. Half-way in the update, we calculated that we wouldn't have enough time until the freight service would show up.

So we asked the secretary that she should be a bit flirty to the parcel guy, invite him to a coffee and chat around to buy us more time. We closed the last parcel just when he figured that he had to continue with his tour.

Google: hey website owner, use link rel preload for images loaded by CSS to reduce roundtrip delays. Chrome supports that, Safari also, and even Edge does.

Mozilla: we had some bug with preload back in FF 57 and our solution since has just been to disable preload per default. Done. Who would care about loading speed?

Also Mozilla: we have no idea why our market share has been plunging. Google is evil.

Apple vs. Microsoft: who sucks more?

At first glance, it's obvious that Apple sucks more. Their overpriced products are so bad that they rely heavily on vendor lock-in and cult-like brainwashing.

Then again, Apple's vendor lock-in also acts as buyer lock-out so that it's easy to avoid Apple. Basically, Apple sucking more also means they suck less. Think different indeed.

Microsoft on the other hand sucks more because their crap is so ubiquitous that it's difficult to avoid Microsoft.

That looks like a draw - but here's the tie breaker: Microsoft tries to ape Apple, BUT! Microsoft even sucks at copying Apple's suck.

So here's the final verdict: Microsoft sucks more.

My CPU temperature under sustained full load has reached 46°C where it used to be 43°C. That leaves two conclusions: either the thermal paste has gone bad, or summer has started.

This morning in the office:

- bumblebee grounded
- diagnosed low fuel level
- refueled bumblebee with sugar water
- system check pass, airworthiness restored
- bumblebee asked tower for take-off
- tower opened flight window
- super-clean take-off
- bumblebee left control area

:-)

I got two lines of code done today, and they were just changing numeric defines. Time to do that: 2 seconds.

Time for analysing the measurement data of various runs in order to know which numbers will work out: the rest of the day.

Google cripples ad and tracking blockers: In January, Chromium will switch to Manifest V3 which removes an essential API in favour of an inferior one. As usually, Google is being deceitful and touts security concerns as pretext.

That hits all Chromium based browser, such as my beloved Vivaldi. The team argues with their own browser internal blocker, but that's far worse than uBlock Origin. One of Vivaldi's core promises was privacy, and that will go out of the window. The team simply doesn't react to people pointing that out. They're fucked, and they know it.

So what now? Well, going back to Firefox because that will include the crippled new API for extension compatibility, but also keep the powerful old one specifically so that ad and tracking blockers will keep working. Google has just handed Mozilla a major unique selling point, and miraculously, Mozilla didn't fuck it up.

Interesting bug hunt!

Got called in because a co-team had a strange bug and couldn't make sense of it. After a compiler update, things had stopped working.

They had already hunted down the bug to something equivalent to the screenshot and put a breakpoint on the if-statement. The memory window showed the memory content, and it was indeed 42. However, the debugger would still jump over do_stuff(), both in single step and when setting a breakpoint on the function call. Very unusual, but the rest worked.

Looking closer, I noticed that the pointer's content was an odd number, but was supposed to be of type uint32_t *. So I dug out the controller's manual and looked up the instruction set what it would do with a 32 bit load from an unaligned address: the most braindead thing possible, it would just ignore the lowest two address bits. So the actual load happened from a different address, that's why the comparison failed.

I think the debugger fetched the memory content bytewise because that would work for any kind of data structure with only one code path, that's how it bypassed the alignment issue. Nice pitfall!

Investigating further why the pointer was off, it turned out that it pointed into an underlying array of type char. The offset into the array was correctly divisible by 4, but the beginning had no alignment, and a char array doesn't need one. I checked the mapfiles and indeed, the old compiler had put the array to a 4 byte boundary and the new one didn't.

Sure enough, after giving the array a 4 byte alignment directive, the code worked as intended.

Can you see it? :-)

Story of a penguin fledgling, one of my end users whom I migrated from Win 7 to Linux Mint. She had been on Windows since Win 98 and still uses Windows at work.

Three months before. Me, Linux might not be as good, but Win 10 is even worse. User, mh.
Migration. User, looks different, but not bad.
One month later. User, it's nice, I like it.
Three months later. User, why does Windows reboot doing lengthy stuff?
Six months later. User, I hate Windows. Why is everyone using this crap?
One year later. Malware issues at work. User to IT staff, that wouldn't have happened with Linux. Me, that's the spirit!

Special 2022 greetings to the last of us who still run truly static websites: update your footer template, recompile, upload.

The best part about home office isn't that you can fart without co-workers getting annoyed. It's that you can even use a lighter on the fart to see whether it will burn.

I did it - I went outside! Felt strange, like Y2K and Maya doomsday would have been together. Of course I went out only during daylight because THEY hide in the dark. Infrastructure was mostly still intact, I've even seen some houses. Occasionally, survivors scrambling the area.

GPS didn't work so I used my magnetic compass. OK, it was because I forgot my mobile at home, but anyway. Should I take petrol with me so that I could burn my clothing upon return? Or would this attract THEM? Occasional gunfire in the distance. Might also be some pneumatic hammer, that's what the media would try to tell me.

The local supermarket had still trolleys outside. I took note because I might need them to bar the stairwell, along with the land mines that I still have left over from New Year's Eve.

Deserted cars standing around. Looked like neatly parked, but that doesn't mean anything. When Germans turn into zombies, their last human action is to park their cars. That's so genetically hardwired that no virus can override it.

Dusk set in. I better returned home.

Context: a co-worker had sent an email and was worried about possible collateral damage.

Co-worker: uhm, you know how it is when something just doesn't feel right?

Me: sure, every time I clock in here.

Customer call.

Customer: what's the status of the software?
Me: it's a bit of wood work.
Customer: wood work?!
Me: yes, I think it would work.
Customer: ...
Me: ...

Splash pages. Remember that crap from 20 years ago? That was a home page with some "click to enter" nonsense to get to the actual home page. Laughably stupid.

Today's empty home pages where you have to scroll down to get to any real content is exactly the same moronic pattern, just by another name: showing off useless design wankery and forcing user interaction to bypass it. Fuck you if you still do that shit.

So, today for my SO's father who is already over 70 and wants to try Linux. However, he doesn't want Linux on his main PC for now, rather on the old one so that he can take his time to get familiar, which is a reasonable plan.

But holy crap, what a machine! Intel Core2 Duo 4400, 2 GB DDR2(!) RAM, 250 GB IDE(!) HDD, DVD RW drive. Graphics, sound and LAN integrated on the mobo chipset. It's half a miracle that it doesn't run on steam. The machine had been delivered with Vista and has always been painfully slow.

It doesn't even support booting from USB, but I had prepared a DVD just in case. Surprise: it booted from DVD without issues and with full HW support!

Partitioned and installed, deleted Vista in the process (felt good). I went with the full blown Mint 20 Cinnamon edition because XFCE isn't as beautiful. Also, having XFCE now and then Cinnamon looking different on the other PC would be confusing.

Installation took some time, but worked. Cinnamon's RAM usage is at 750 MB idle, and at 1.1 GB with Firefox started. Once the PC is booted, it runs pretty OK with reduced swappiness and noatime on all file systems, plus unnecessary startup applications disabled. Updates took long, but ran through successfully. Installed LibreOffice and some small games, Firefox got uBlock Origin, Youtube worked OOTB.

That PC somehow had escaped disposal several times - and now has a proper OS for the first time in its miserable existence. It runs so much better than it ever has. Just wow, a "big" Linux desktop from 2020 blows a contemporary Vista out of the water on such an old machine!

Funniest meeting ever!

Some years ago, there was the regular department meeting where useless news from upper management were handed down. The team I was in was also there: team lead, co-worker and me. The team lead had a new girl and was daydreaming of their nights, my co-worker wasn't quite back from the football match on the weekend, and I was playing chess on my mobile.

Department lead was blah blah blah and when can we do this on your rig? We looked at each other and instantly realised that none had been paying attention.

My co-worker was the fastest to recover and straight-facedly turned to me: "Well Fast-Nop, that's your domain."

I picked the ball up before team lead could say something: "Sure, but schedule appointment is for our lead."

Our lead couldn't contradict us and then had to negotiate a schedule while trying to find out what it was about. *LOL*

Talk with a co-worker who has a bit of a motivational problem.

Him: if I had more fun, I would be more productive.
Me: you're not here for fun, that's why they pay us.
Him: how are you motivated?
Me: by money.

...

A bit later.

Him: do you plan for retirement some day?
Me: no. By then, there won't be retirement anymore. We will eat fried rats in the street.

He starts understanding why I'm wearing black metal shirts.

Seems legit

I wanted to play Pirates under DOS back then, but it didn't have the left-handed mouse button switch like Windows.

So I opened the mouse, scratched the PCB button lines away, soldered wires cross-over, and had a left-handed mouse also under DOS.

Amdy's story.

Amdy didn't have it easy. He's just a little APU and was already outdated when he was manufactured. But it got even worse! He didn't do anything wrong, but upon assembly, they lasered a different part number on him.

He didn't think much about it, but then they denied him all the goodies his brothers got: a nice printed box, a cooler, a leaflet, and a sticker.

Amdy didn't get any of that and wasn't welcome in the boxed camp. Instead, they stuffed him into a shoddy tray cardboard box with just some ESD foam for the pins.

Amdy was disappointed. That was just not fair! He was capable like his brothers. To add insult to injury, not even the manufacturer wanted to give warranty on the poor ugly duckling. They didn't listen to his complaints and shipped him to an unknown fate.

Then our roads crossed because Amdy was 10 EUR cheaper than the boxed ones at that point. Little Amdy breathed heavily when he finally got out of the mini box and seemed a bit disoriented. Poor little sod, what did they do to you?

Then he spotted the cooler. He had never seen anything like this before, so much better than the coolers his boxed brothers had received! And even top of the line thermal paste!

Amdy decided to be as good and fast a processor as a small Zen+ APU could possibly be. What was that software stuff? Didn't look like Windows. Ooohhh - Amdy rejoiced when he figured out that he was supposed to run Linux!

And that's how a despaired and unhappy APU finally found a life full of goodness.

Happy new year, and those last of us running truly static websites: change your footer year!

Hallucinations of my father that keep taking control of my psyche and making me hack things I don't remember or shooting me in the head to break down my sanity.

I'm astonished again. Linux isn't designed as GUI OS - where Windows has dynamic thread priorities for freshly woken up threads as to increase GUI snappiness.

Now, my CPU has four physical and eight logical cores for SMT. I'm running eight worker threads of some parallel testing stuff, and I'm glad that I chose the AMD 3400G over the 3200G. The CPU load is 100%. On top of that, MP3 audio, the browser, and I'm dd'ing an external USB3 HDD.

Holy shit, the browser is just as smooth as if the CPU were idle. No perceivable lag. I hadn't expected desktop Linux to be that great.

I'm also surprised that the CPU temperature doesn't exceed 44°C despite full load at 21°C ambient, and the cooling is inaudible. Sure, my cooler is massively over-dimensioned to achieve exactly that, but it's still amazing.

It's what I would have wanted ten years ago and only could approach somewhat, but now the tech is actually there.

Bootcrap. Just looked at their main page, and it's a whopping 75k of markup plus 294k of CSS (W-T-F?!), and 224k of JS. All of that shit for a page that shouldn't be more than 10k of markup, 16k of CSS, and that has no reason to even use JS at all.

<a class="d-flex flex-column flex-lg-row justify-content-center align-items-center mb-4 text-dark lh-sm text-decoration-none

Yeah, that crap is supposed to be "easier" to write. That's what you get for totally failing to understand how HTML/CSS even work, clinging to late 1990s practices, and ditching decades of progress since then.

Although the Bootcrap folks do manage to write valid HTML. As low as that sounds, but that counts already as an exceptional skill in the notoriously low-skilled frontend "dev" world that is all about making shitty websites.

Oh, and the rest like Failwind and Bulimia aren't any better. They already fail at delivering valid HTML on their websites.

Uh-oh shit went wrong with umpteen thousand jobs in a pointer heavy, multi-threaded application in raw C. Fuck, some pointer gone wild?!

30 minutes later, after trying to find out how many jobs it takes to start failing. Noticed that it's about the default settings. Wait what? That's where the realloc'ing should kick in, check that.

Aahhhh. Maybe I shouldn't zero the whole buffer after realloc, just the new part. D'uh!

Tried to use chatGPT. These motherfuckers want a phone number. Yeah no assholes, fuck you.

Haha nice, now everyone's avatar is a rubber duck!

Bring me some coffee.

In my master equivalent thesis, I was supposed to build upon a year of work from my predecessors. However, I argued that it had no actual foundation and would never work properly, so I threw it away and started from scratch.

The prof was astonished and commented "well it's your thesis", insinuating that the risk was on me. Turned out I had been right.

So you're sitting on your crappy Win 10 and whine about that piece of shit, huh? You had five fucking years to come up with a plan, but noooo. Instead, you put your thumb up your asshole and hoped MS would change ways. Only that they didn't, and that's because they bet on people like YOU, and now you have to suck your dirty thumb.

I just converted a massive project from C to cuda, I renamed everything, and it just worked.
What the fuck have I done wrong?

One of my coworkers just had a baby, so he left work today and won't be back for a month or more.

We (accidentally) took the client's website down for 3 hours, messed up our git repo and when we finally fixed both things, I had to spend the rest of the day editing fucking vector graphics (which I had never done before and completely suck at).

I never realized how much work this guy does or how important he is until now.

Dear ISP,
Thank your for throttling my internet right in the middle of a hurricane! Now not only does Netflix not work and GitHub take forever, but I can't even get live weather updates. Time to code using cave paintings I guess till the power goes out.

C has too much undefined behaviour because the standards comittee was being lazy and slapped that on a lot of issues that ought to have been implementation defined instead.

The most ridiculous example for UB: An unmatched ' or " character is encountered on a logical source line during tokenization.

Like WTF, that should be a compile time error, and it's easy to detect.

80% of the letters in "Intel" also appear in "Hitler" while none of the letters in "AMD" do.

The seventh fishcake.

Usually, I buy six fishcakes in the weekly shopping. Today, the seller accidentally put on seven, wanted to put back the seventh, but it fell into the egg salad. She took the fishcake and was about to throw it away because no customer would buy a fish cake with egg salad sauce on it. I intervened in time and bought it to avoid throwing food away.

Afterwards, I thought about how sick and decadent it actually is that it would have been perfectly normal to throw food away just because food was sticking on the food.

Hmmm... the GNOME paradox: make a desktop that is total shit without extensions and themes. Provide no stable API for them. Break them upon every release.

Top it off claiming that themes are bad anyway because if not all Gnome installations look alike, that hurts your "brand recognition". WTF?!

You probably know the "marshmellow experiment": have one marshmellow now, or delay the gratification by some time, then get two. What the experiment is supposed to measure is something like intelligence or impulse control.

Hot take: what it also measures, and much more so when it comes to reality, is trust. If I don't trust the other side to be both able and willing to deliver on the promise later, I will rather secure the smaller reward right now.

Today in the office, a co-worker and me had a synchronised rant. Both sitting at each our desks, and independently of each other, he suddenly cursed "I hate text fields" while I burst out "network, piece of shit!"

Bethesda is full of shit. Starfield somehow needs a super new PC because it alledgedly uses modern SW tech.

Strange point: while a high-end PC with 7800X3D and 4090 makes the performance bearable (though not great), the graphics don't look spectacular. In fact, they look outdated.

No Bethesda, you don't use modern tech. You require modern HW tech to make up somewhat for your shitty engine and incompetent devs.

I love GDB on CLI!

I'm using an OSS tool for multi-threaded testing stuff, and it's nice but segfaulted after 30 minutes.

I was too lazy to set up an IDE project and click through tons of stupid shit, so I just compiled the tool with debug symbols, fired up GDB on CLI, let it run until a crash, got a strack trace and quickly found the problem.

I sent a bug analysis to the author, plus a patch which got accepted, done.

I ordered a reduction sieve for my espresso cooker from Amazon, but got this instead (Euro coin for size comparison). They'll resend the correct article, but WTF is this shit even?! Crazy crap!

Sudo apt-get remove --purge hurricane-irma

With the shitty weather, WFH is quite attractive this year.

"Smart" home gym equipment: expensive hardware for some grand, proprietary software, and ongoing subscription fees in the $50/mo ballpark.

The SW is usually designed so that even shit that could have been local is instead stored remote as to make the subscription look more worthwhile. The large front-up cost serves not only as revenue, but also to anchor the vendor lock-in.

Open source hackers could potentially unchain the HW so that users would actually own what they purchased, but there is a catch: the HW is sold at a loss, and the subscription is the business model.

Freeing up the HW would render the subscription rather useless, and ramping up the HW sales prices to profitability would destroy any demand.

Basically, it's products that are technically feasible, but not economically viable. Which is why they are not the future of home gyms.

From Sarah Connor Chronicles, 2008: "They used to think that 12 nanometer scale was impossible. The circuits are so tiny, you're all but in the quantum realm. It's the most sophisticated processor on earth. If you could take your memories, your consciousness, everything that makes you a person, turn it into pure data, and download it onto a machine, that chip could run it."

I'm watching the DVD on a quadcore Ryzen APU that is built in 12nm, and it was already outdated when I bought it last year. I guess I better download myself to my laptop because that's a 7nm Ryzen.

Had a customer call - the guy's name was "Kevin", which in Germany isn't even a name, but rather a diagnosis for stupidity. However, he was really competent and into the stuff. So what now, readjust my prejudice? Nah, he had an Asian family name, so I instead learnt that being of Asian ancestry trumps "Kevin" as given name.

So I've kicked off the motorcycle season for this year! Scanned some nice roads for speed control traps or road dirt, then the same route with more WABROOOOOO.

That machine is whopping 19 years old, and I still like it as much as on the first day when I bought it as new. Plus that it doesn't have software nonsense, not even injection. Means, it fucking works.

I had a delivery deadline on the same day when an urgent support request came in. My boss was a stupid sucker who was afraid of taking responsibility, and that's a vice I absolutely hate with bosses.

We had quite a heated argument where he just wanted me to give priority to both things, which I declined because I had no idea how much time the support research would take me.

Finally, he decided that I should work on the support item immediately, but only for up to one hour. He was totally surprised when I accepted that without further argument. I told him that all I had wanted from him had been a priority decision, and that was one.

Felt like explaining to my boss what his fucking job was.

Wanna know why Windows sucks so much? It's because of the Windows users. No, really!

Windows user: But but but I can't switch away from Windows because MIMIMI!
Microsoft: Ah, is that so? Then why should we even try to make (and pay for) an effort?

WFH = Wacken from Home!

Customer demands some complicated shit be done within a few hours to align with their schedule.
Me: this is not aligned with reality.
Customer: ...

Bit rot under scientific research: using a very high-end microscope, I was able to take a picture of bit rot in action. It's microtrolls eating the bits!

- booting Linux
- starting Clonezilla
- kernel panic after some time
- WTF, this used to work
- look at sensor values
- CPU is really hot
- CPU fan doesn't work
- BIOS warning disabled because the lowest regular fan level is 0 RPM

Luckily, I still had some cheap 120mm fan which is a bit louder, but works. What's astonishing is that in normal operation, i.e. without full load, the case fans alone provided enough air stream for the CPU cooler.

IBM decided to change the EOL of CentOS 8 from 2029 to 2021, then continue CentOS as useless RR testbed. What a nice attempt at forcing users into the paid RedHat version.

That's a risky move because Rocky Linux is already gearing up to replace CentOS, and the whole RedHat ecosystem could bleed out to Ubuntu, Suse, and Debian LTS. Well done, suits.

Not CS degree, but EE, and totally worth the effort. Not only that without degree, I wouldn't get jobs in many companies, but I actually learnt a lot. Laplace and Fourier will be as valid in a 100 years as they were 200 years ago.

Yeah, it was fucking hard. Math was rather OK, only 50% of the students failed the first exam. EE was harder, 90% failed at the first try. That wasn't regarded as problem - on the contrary, the exams were designed to weed out. After two semesters, we already had 50% student loss.

I remember what the EE prof told us in the first semester: we would learn a lot of things, but most importantly, to think like an engineer. Didn't make sense right away, but 5 years later, I knew what he had been talking about.

Dialogue when I entered the room of a co-worker, and it wasn't an individual office.

Me: YO MAMA her son bitching 'bout compiler licence?
Him: Kiss my ass!
Me: Could cram a wet roll of toilet paper down your pants.
Him: Yeah that'd come pretty close.

Other co-workers: WTF?

Code fuckup day or what?! After two weeks where I wasn't on my project and a co-worker handled it, I came back to my project and reviewed what he had done so far.
Me: "I don't understand how this new code part here can work?"
Him: "Uhm, actually, it doesn't, somehow."
Me: "..."
Then he had checked in his stuff with spaces while the whole project is with tabs. And variables that were used in a different way, but still under the old name, now completely misleading. Bypassing existing infrastructure and defines with "just for this case" hacks. But the best was tracking higher level state by peeking into lower level data buffers, even pulling out their data definitions into global header files - instead of using proper states in the higher layer itself.
NOT! IN! MY! FUCKING! PROJECT!!!
So I spent the day cleaning up the shit to fight off software rot right in the beginning.

I'm starting to like the crisis. Not only that I have home office, I'm also in for reduced working time. 3.5 days per week from next month on, and the state will fund 60% of the pay loss. Yeah!

For decades, the computer industry has been talking about replacing silicon in future chips.

AMD finally did it - all of their more recent chips are made of military grade unobtanium!

Today, I found this gem here in the codebase I've taken over:

#define BYTE unsigned char

FFS, use typedef, it's there for a reason. Solving the puzzle in the first comment.

Downloaded Manjaro ISO to have a look and check hardware compatibility.
Rebooted and selected USB stick to start.
Piece of shit didn't boot.
Booted back into Mint.
Opened USB stick in Nemo - empty.

Ooops. I had forgotten to write the ISO to the USB stick.
Did that, worked wonders, Manjaro booted successfully.

This mission looks pretty interesting

If you ever get bored with how far Linux has come these days, there is a solution: BSD. That shit catapults you easily back by 25 years.

So if Arch isn't shitty enough for your desire as late born and you really want to know what a piece of crap Linux was in the late 90s, have a look at BSD.

So I'm writing some multithreaded shit in C that is supposed to work cross-platform. MingW has Posix threads for Windows, so that saved already half of the platform dependency. The other half was that these threads need to run external programs.

Well, there's system(), right? Uhm yes, but it sucks. It's incredibly slow on Windows, and it looks like you can have only one system() call ongoing at the same time. Which kinda defeats the multithreaded driver. Ok, but there's CreateProcessA(), and that doesn't suck.

Fine, now for Linux. The fork/exec hack is quite ugly, but it works and is even fast. Just never use fork() without immediate exec(). First try under Cygwin... crap I fork bombed my system! What is this shit? Ah I fucked up the path names so that the external executable couldn't be run.

Lesson learnt: put an exit() right after the exec() in the path for child process. Should never be reached, but if it goes there, the exit() at least prevents a fork bomb.

Well yeah, sort of works under Cygwin, but only with up to 3 threads. Beyond that, it seems like fork() at some point gives two processes the same PID, and then shit hangs.

Even slapping a mutex around the fork and releasing it only in the parent process didn't help. Fork in Cygwin is like a fork in the ass. posix_spawn() should work better because it can be mapped more easily to the Windows model, but still no dice.

OK, testing under real Linux. Yeah, no issues with that one! But instead, I get some obscure "free(): invalid size" abort. What the fuck would that even mean?! Checking my free() calls: all fine.

Time to fire up GDB in the terminal! Put a catch on the abort signal, mh got just hex data. Shit I forgot to compile with -O0 and -g. Next try. Backtrace shows the full call trace, back to the originating line in my program - which is fclose() on a file.

Ahhh I remember! Under Linux, fclosing a file that is already closed makes the program crash. So probably I was closing it twice. Checking back.. yeah that's where it was.

Shit runs fast on several cores now!

Meeting with a co-worker who is supposed to do a code analysis on a large legacy project. Actually, HER project - she inherited it already years ago, and the original devs aren't in the company anymore.

Her: customer is asking this and that analysis.
Me: easily two weeks.
Her: but who will do that?
Me: you of course.
Her: but I don't know most of the code.
Me: me neither.
Her: and I don't know the protocols.
Me: google them. I'd have to do the same.

Really, I told her to google shit, which I consider as quite a slap for a co-worker. Basically, she tried to offload a complex analysis because she just wants the low effort parts of the job.

Won't happen. DO YOUR FUCKING JOB!

I'm starting to hate 2020. Back pain because of muscle strain, ongoing middle ear inflammation, and now a tooth crown has broken off. Fuck this shit.

​​​​​​

Wow, I still remember some math after decades. Today, I needed some parameter calculation in an interval with smooth transition at both ends (i.e. continuously differentiable). So I used a 3rd degree polynomial where the values and derivations gave a 4x4 linear equation system. I lazily hacked that into WolframAlpha, and it works nicely.

Shaving with an old-style safety razor just rocks - that metal thing consisting of three pieces where a slotted, double edged razor blade fits in. With the good Russian Astra Platinum blades at 10 cent per piece where a hundred piece pack lasts for years. The whole thing can be fully dismantled and cleaned.

I can't understand why people use this modern overpriced Gillette shit at 2 EUR per piece that you can't even clean, with debris stuck in-between that starts to rot if you use the blade block more than once. Must be brainwashing by ads. Even worse for women who pay 50% extra for the pink version of that unhygienic shit.

Oh, and real shaving soap with a real shaving brush and not the canned aerosol garbage that doesn't really work anyway.

This is a mind-blowing mate in 4. Let's call it "Schrödinger's Mate".

Oldie but goldie.. after my studies, I was looking for my first job and did interviews. In one of the companies, they asked me whether I knew C. Well yes, I had been programming in C. Ah no, that wasn't enough - they asked whether I was really good in C. I got suspicious and argued that there was the project documentation anyway, right? Turned out, no. The code was the documentation, as I had suspected.
Then my question - as freshman, mind you: "Do you have any plans to get to a more professional way of developing?"
The interview was pretty much over at that point, the boss got actually angry. Well, interviews work both ways, and he had failed. I surely dodged a bullet.

Yeaaahhh that moment when the program flawlessly crunches through ten thousands of files, only limited by the slowish HDD! :-)

In full multi-threading, tons of dynamic buffer resizing, pointer shit left and right, also two star programming, and everything written in raw C!

Phone call with customers and their minutes-of-meeting writer.
Me: Blabla round robin algorithm.
Customer's MoM writer: What? How do you spell "robin"?
Me: Robin like in Batman.
Customer's MoM writer: Ah, ok.

NOT saving the world in 2019. I already did that in 2012 when the Maya calendar ended and wasn't being thanked - on the contrary, people said "haha look, nothing happened".

How I confused an Indian co-worker.
I noticed that his office desk was using a multi-outlet power strip connected to another one, and then one more after that, because the cable length was too short.
Me: pointing out that this is not allowed in our company.
Him: dafuq-look.
Me: yeah, electrical safety, we need to replace this. Gonna ask IT whether they have something (they did), replaced it.
Him: different dafuq-look.
Me: I guess that's the most German thing you've run into, right?
Him: uh, yes, but I can see the point. :)

My dad has had an android phone for about 3 years now. He just learnt that the big circle at the bottom takes you to the home screen. I love my dad.

And just when you like Linux a little too much, it bites you in the ass to remind you why the year of the Linux desktop never happened.

Wifi printer is installed, CUPS test page works, even scanning works. But printing anything else results in the printer spitting out raw postscript with a few random lines per page.

Great. Looks like I'll have to print to PDF, then go to a copy shop and print because printing under Linux is still an unsolved issue.

And yes, that would have worked even with Windows 10. Fuck.

Unpopular opinion: having a good shit tops bad sex.

NOX android emulator is awesome. Super fast. Even faster than genymotion I think. AND FREE! with super minimal ads.
Check it out android devs!

My GPU blocks the airflow from the lower front intake fan to the CPU, so I wanted to have a fan in the 5.25" drive bay directly targeting the CPU.

While that bay fits a 140mm fan nicely, there was no mounting point. I ended up making four fan struts out of the metal covers for the 5.25" inserts, the ones that you wiggle out. Drilled holes into the case, a bit of foam above and below the fan to seal the larger gaps, and done.

The trick is ofc that the 5.25" case covers are meshed and hence act both as air intake and dust filter. The CPU runs a few K cooler under load.

Installing a GPU is easy - except if it doesn't fit in the case. I had to saw off 3cm of the upper, 5.25" bay. Just removing the bay cage entirely was not an option because I still need that for my DVD drive.

My bow saw wouldn't have enough space, and the cage is riveted. So despite terrible ergonomics, I used the metal saw of a fucking Swiss Army knife for 24cm of cut length through 1mm steel. Then I filed off the cuts so that I won't injure myself later.

However, I was too lazy to take out the mobo and shit, so I protected it professionally against potential metal dust - with a towel.

My setup: AMD Phenom-2 1100T with fat cooler for silent PC, 16 GB ECC RAM, AMD Radeon HD-6850 passively cooled, WD Blue 1 TB HDD. One 22 inch monitor with 1650 x 1050.
The mouse is a bit broken because the click switch under the mouse wheel doesn't work anymore. The empty bottle in front of the PC is necessary for lying on the room light switch, or else it won't work. And the black/yellow tape is a fix for the worn out seat cover.
But the best, under the monitor, is the little green troll that serves as rubber duck.

LOL that's why I love C!

The function pointer cast for strcmp because qsort expects a compare function with two const void * pointers instead of two const char * pointers, that's just beautiful.

Not to mention the hack to abuse strcmp on a struct - which just works because the first struct member is a string and the rest just gets swapped with memcpy as opaque data.

I guess that wouldn't pass a code review at work. :-)

So, Terminator : Dark Fate was in the cinema. Not as good as I had expected, and Hollywood's contemporary in-your-face leftist propaganda made it even weaker.

My wife was done with exercises on her electronic 88 keys piano.
Me: I also know something nice.
Her: oh so?
Me: (repeatedly typing key #3)
Her: (thinking)
Her: C hacking?!

Happy world penguin day!

Got my new PC up and running!

CPU: AMD Ryzen 5 3400G (APU)
Cooler: Scythe Mugen 5
Mobo: Asus B450-F Gaming ROG Strix
RAM: Crucial Ballistix 2x16GB
SSD: Samsung 2TB M2 Evo 860
DVD: Plextor PX-891SAF
PSU: Bequiet Straight Power 11 550W
Case: Lancool PC-K58 (10 years old)
Case fans: Bequiet Silentwings 3 140mm (front), Silentwings 2 120mm (back)

The cooler is massively oversized for the CPU, but perfect for a silent PC.

OS: Linux Mint 20 Cinnamon

As much as I loved Win 7, but it's over, and Win 10 just isn't acceptable.

Shit, everytime I use the WFI instruction, I'm reading it as "waifu".

I came around the corner in the corridor where a senior PM talked with an engineer.

PM: ... and that's why a good team is so important and we also need sensitive people.
Me: do we have some here?
PM: oh yes, I'm highly sensitive.
Me: one learns something new every day. :-)

Everyone: Parcel delivery sucks because the couriers often don't even ring and just claim nobody was there.

Me: Can't confirm - giving these (poorly paid!) people 2 EUR tips works like a charm because they do remember that.

Nvidia at it again. After receiving backlash for trying to pass off a 4070 as 4080/12GB, und "unlaunching" it, they did the same shit again.

This time with a 3060/8GB. Yes, as RTX 3060, a well established product with a lot of reviews, intentionally misleading the customers who think that a 3060 is always the regular 12GB model. And the new shit isn't even cheaper.

The main issue isn't the reduced amount of VRAM, it's cutting down the memory bus from 192 to 128 bits, that costs quite some performance.

So if you see a 3060 and think it might be a bargain, watch out that you don't accidentally end up with the "bait and switch" 8GB model.

Or even better, consider a 6650 XT that is both faster and cheaper than a 3060, and RT is lackluster on the small RTX cards anyway.

I noped out of the coffee communism in my company. It's always the same assholes who just take the last cup out of the thermos jug and don't set up a new one. I'm fed up with this shit, and the company coffee itself is also cheap. I'm with my French Press and custom coffee now.

How lawyers fuck up technology!

I rented a car today, given that I don't want to go by train currently. That was some VW Golf, and it had a lane assist which can't decide whether to be helpful or obnoxious:

Either I kept the steering wheel and still steered myself, in which case the lane assist's actions made the steering feel somewhat wobbly. Initially, I suspected a worn out control arm bearing, but that's a long term damage in aging cars, not in new ones.

Or I just rested my hands on my upper legs, as I usually do (palms facing upwards and holding the wheel lightly), then the lane assist worked by itself. It was even smart enough to deactivate itself upon blinking before changing lanes.

However, it complained after about 15 seconds that I didn't steer. I said, shut up and do your job. The warning intensified, and I said, fuck you. Then it initiated some stutter braking to wake me up. Annoying like a reincarnation of Clippy.

I ended up giving the steering wheel a slight tip to the right every 15, 20 seconds just to let the lane assist know I was still there, relying on the lane assist to correct it again. On a long trip, I would have had to deactivate that crap.

Obviously, the VW engineers did their job, but the legal department feared law suits should anything go wrong and ruined the feature!

What was also annoying is that there is no real hand brake anymore in many modern cars. Sucks when pulling off against a hill. Plus that at red traffic lights, I usually put the gear out (manual transmission) and pull the hand brake instead of keeping my foot on the clutch. That's not the same with this pseudo hand brake!

(In case you wonder why anyone would do that:
it's an anachronism that avoids lengthening the clutch wires, decades after cars switched to hydraulics.)

Arrrrrry new year, you bloody pirates!

For those few of us still running fully static sites: remember to update the year constant, re-compile and upload.

JS devs be like...

There's an interesting species out there, the skiplings. They are small, furry beasts, and usually go unseen because they live underground. When there's trembling action however, they leave their burrows to check out what's going on, typically while sitting up.

The rarest breed has the distinct habit of appearing quickly, and once things are observed to be calm, slowly return underground. They are mildly social in that several of them can inhabitate an area, but each has its own little den for sleeping.

Unfortunately, skiplings are a rare species so that they are protected under WCAG 2.1 section 2.4.1 at maximum criticality level A.

Win 10 on ARM will not make it. Here's why:

- The devices are ridiculously overpriced.
- Performance is abysmal with emulation.
- Native ports are rare because nobody buys the devices.
- MS doesn't get it.

Instead of addressing the chicken and egg problem, MS even fucks up more: Win 10 S, which is usually pre-installed, can only run shit from the app store. Yeah MS, you think just because Apple gets away with this crap, so can you? Newsflash, Windows isn't iOS, and you aren't Apple.

Even VS 2019 doesn't install the ARM toolchains by default. Because, why would MS entice devs to address ARM64 as conveniently as possible?

MS will just keep gawking at Apple like a pig at a clockwork, and Win 10 on ARM will go down like Windows Phone.

The good: use the hardware watchdog in your application control flow.

The bad: don't use a watchdog.

The ugly: trigger the watchdog from a fucking timer interrupt.

That's funny: Pagespeed says that google.com has SEO issues.

Office Ninja!

Today, my PM dropped by in the morning and mentioned she had some customer feedback on some item in a project where I'm the holiday replacement for someone else. I already had work to do, so that kind of interruption wasn't welcome.

"Well yeah, just forward it to me, I'll see what I can do", I told her. She agreed. Half an hour later, still no email from her. Hey, that looked promising!

For the rest of the day, I didn't talk to her, avoided speaking at all when she was near and even sneaked by her room (open doors) in silent mode lest I drew her attention and she might have remembered the email.

Until afternoon when I went home, still no email. Success! :-)

Both GCC and Clang can switch off the braindead type-based aliasing rules through the "-fno-strict-aliasing" compiler option so that everything can alias everything.

On the other hand, C offers the "restrict" qualifier for pointers where you promise that nothing will alias this memory area, not even same type pointers.

What happens if you use "restrict", but compile with "-fno-strict-aliasing"? Will the "restrict" be obeyed or disregarded?

Answer in the comments.

Power metal

I don't know if this brand is popular outside my country, so I thought you guys should know this is a thing

Took a devops position for a friend who needed help managing a small datacenter.

Five months of writing nothing but yaml for ansible. I'm about to go mad...

A server application pulled off some sort of listings as table. Problem was, it crashed with some thousand data files after one and a half hours. I looked into that, and couldn't stop WTFing.

A stupid server side script fetched the data in XML (WTF!) and then inserted shit node-wise (WTF!!), which was O(n^2) - in PHP and on XML! Then it converted the whole shebang into HTML for browser display although users would finally copy/paste the result into Excel anyway.

The original developer even had written a note on the application page that pulling the data "could take long". Yeah because it's so fucking STUPID that Clippy is an Einstein in comparison, that's why!

So I pulled the raw data via batch file without XML wrapping and wrote a little C program for merging the dumped stuff client-side in O(n), spitting out a final CSV for Excel import.

Instead of fucking the server for 1.5 hours and then crashing, shit is done after 7 seconds, out of which the actual data processing takes 40 bloody milliseconds!

Ah NOX you've done it again 🤗🤗🤗

PCs are a clusterfuck these days. Microsoft has abandoned the niceness of Win-7 and opted for Win-10 - with spyware, untested forced updates and forced online licence checks to make sure you have to get the shit. Macs are total crap, and Apple doesn't care because they instead prefer to milk customers with overpriced iShit. Linux sucks and looks like a Soviet tractor, but at least, it doesn't fuck up itself just by switching it on.

I had Linux as only OS from 2001 to 2010, and while I obviously can deal with it, I finally hated it enough to switch over to Win-7. From 2020 on, it looks like I will be back because Microsoft has managed to fuck up Windows even worse (and then these suckers wonder why Github users don't trust them). Maybe I'll buy a Tux when I install Linux so that I can punch it in the face.

Progress was yesterday - today it's about damage control. Welcome to a world where the brightest CS guys are thinking about how not only to shove up even more ads into peoples' asses, but how to also transmit lab data of the poo.

Solving all my issues with flexbox because why not...