Client: Hey, you're the IT guy right?
Me: Hey, how can I help?
Client: Yeah for some reason I've lost power to my computer
Me: *Checks power, all computers are down due to a power cut*
Me: You'll have to contact your power supplier as you've lost power to all computers and lights.
Client: What, but the computers are not working right? - that's you're job not mine
Me: That's not how it works.
Client: Fix this or I'll bill you for the loss of money we've encountered during this and report this to your boss.
Me: How about I bill you for my time and advice and inform by boss that you tried to blame me for a power cut.
Client: You can try.
Me: *walks off and puts time in the ticket, requests purchasing to send an invoice*

2 Days later:
The client does not pay the invoice.
Me: (phone call) Hi, an invoice has been sent to you and we haven't received payment yet.
Client: were not paying that, you broke our power and made our computers break
Me: null

I am so sick and tired of hearing "I'm not good with computers" from these god damn secretaries I have to work with.

Fuck you! I mean, seriously, FUCK YOU! That God damn piece of shit Windows XP door stop has been on your desk for at LEAST a decade (shit, I think that was the same PC my highschool had, and I'm in my mid thirties)!

What in the FUCK do you mean you don't know the difference between files and folder? How? HOW can you stare at that damn screen every fucking work day off your life and not grasp simple concepts!

And FUCK THE ADMINISTRATION for hiring these volunteerily ignorant babies who refuse to bother figuring out more than just where the power button is (and, fuck me, even THAT took years).

Fuck me if, after spending 40 God damn minutes of my time trying to guide some secretary, who's been working twice as long as I have and making probably twice as much, on how to copy a file from one folder to another, I have to listen to some fucking pity speech "I just don't get this high tech computer stuff. I'm just too old"

And FUCK society for allowing this fucking behavior! I don't know any other piece of technology where people are happy being so blindly ignorant to even the basics! I don't know Jack shit about the internal working of a car, but I know where and how to use my steering wheel and peddles and that I need to take the thing for an oil change. Hell, I even know when my tires look bad... If I can do that, you can fucking learn how to copy a god damn file without needing me to help you... FOR A FUCKING HOUR!

FUUUUCK!

*Takes a deep breath*
So... How was your day?

Mac: Suddenly turns off
Me: Fuck my code..F***
Mac: No response at all
Me: reset SMC etc etc
Mac: I am dead (no battery detection, dies after 10 min on power adaptor)
Me: Skips a heart beat..(Git, oh yea git)

**Takes Mac to store, After diagnosis**

Apple Freaking Genius (AG): Your Mac has a mother board problem it needs to be replaced.
Me: Hmm what is the problem exactly??
AG: Issues in logic board and some other components.
Me: How much?
AG: Out of warranty so $$$ (60% of original amount)
Me: (wtf?) Really
AG: It's entire motherboard replacement .. bla bla

**Bring it home > open > everything seems ok on multimeter as per circuit diagram > finally finds a voltage drop that is not consistent > minute short circuit > remove > check further > nothing else > reassemble > hit power button > starts fine > freaking battery detected > works fine**

0 $ repair

Fixes two more devices @ 0 $ in friend circle

Builds a raspberry pi backup laptop with 3d printed body..Ubuntu.. you know can't live without a computer

#ThugLife #Engineer

I think I'm losing my mind working in the IT Department. 😂 Sometimes the questions are UNBELIEVABLE!

Client: Hi, my computer is not working.

Me: Hi, what's wrong with it?

Client: IDK. It won't work.

Me: Alright, what do you see on your screen?

Client: Nothing!

Me: Nothing as in there are no icons on your desktop or black screen?

Client: Oh, black screen.

Me: Is your monitor on? Do you see a light on the power-on button?

Client: Yes, it's white.

Me: Ok, good. What about your computer? Is it turned on?

Client: Well, I never turn off my computer so I assume it's on. I leave it as is when I leave the office then log-in in the morning when I come in.

**At this point I realized this person doesn't even lock the computer until it locks by itself after a while.

Me: Ok please turn on your computer by pressing the power button with a thin line on it. It should turn white.

Client: Ok but as I said I don't turn it off so why should I turn it on? Did it turn off by itself?

Me: That can happen.

Client: Ok....oh wait, it working! Thank you so much. Sorry if I was a little pain. I am a little stressed out this morning.

Me: No problem. Glad it worked. Have a good day.

*Hangs up confused. I mean really confused. Smh

!Rant

Support Call:
”our PC stick isn't booting up! Come and fix it! (angry)”

Me:
”The PC are meant to boot up whenever power is delivered to them. Are you sure your TVs are powered on?”

Support Call:
”Yes! I just pressed the power button on both TVs and it didn't turn on the PC sticks.”

Me:
”So you can confirm the TVs are on? Can you change the input and see what happens?”

Support Phone:
”Stop wasting my time and send someone down to fix it now! I told you it isn't working!”

Me:
”Ok, we will get someone out to you as soon as possible.”

Then a support guy drives 2 hours to their store.

When he gets there he realizes that the TVs power is connected to a light switch and they has the switch off!!!

He said ”can we turn on some lights so I can see behind the TV?” and then all the fucking TVs came on.

These are times when I fully understand the concept of “firing a customer”.

The customer sent an email saying ”the downtime for your product was unacceptable.” even after it was explained to them that the problem was them turning off the power.

These fucking idiots actually expect us to deliver products to display on TVs without fucking electricity to run them.

First Helpdesk call of the day:

"My PC has been stuck on the same thing for an hour now. Its completely crashed."
"Does pressing ctrl alt delete do anything?"
"Where's that button?"
"Its 3 buttons - ctrl in the bottom left, alt beside the spacebar and delete over near the arrow keys. Press them all at the same time. Does it do anything?"
"No"
"Okay then, you need to manually power off the laptop then."
"How do i do that?"
"Hold down the power button"
"Where's that?"
"....on your laptop?! It's how you turn it on in the mornings?"
*60 seconds go by* "oh i see it. Ok i pressed it! Its Flashing blue now."
"Oh, no, just hold it down until everything goes black."
"The power button?"
"Yes."
"But that would turn off the entire PC?"
"Yes."
"Why do i have to do that?"

God help me if this is how my day is going to be 😢

So this was a couple years ago now. Aside from doing software development, I also do nearly all the other IT related stuff for the company, as well as specialize in the installation and implementation of electrical data acquisition systems - primarily amperage and voltage meters. I also wrote the software that communicates with this equipment and monitors the incoming and outgoing voltage and current and alerts various people if there's a problem.

Anyway, all of this equipment is installed into a trailer that goes onto a semi-truck as it's a portable power distribution system.

One time, the computer in one of these systems (we'll call it system 5) had gotten fried and needed replaced. It was a very busy week for me, so I had pulled the fried computer out without immediately replacing it with a working system. A few days later, system 5 leaves to go work on one of our biggest shows of the year - the Academy Awards. We make well over a million dollars from just this one show.

Come the morning of show day, the CEO of the company is in system 5 (it was on a Sunday, my day off) and went to set up the data acquisition software to get the system ready to go, and finds there is no computer. I promptly get a phone call with lots of swearing and threats to my job. Let me tell you, I was sweating bullets.

After the phone call, I decided I needed to try and save my job. The CEO hadn't told me to do anything, but I went to work, grabbed an old Windows XP laptop that was gathering dust and installed my software on it. I then had to build the configuration file that is specific to system 5 from memory. Each meter speaks the ModBus over TCP/IP protocol, and thus each meter as a different bus id. Fortunately, I'm pretty anal about this and tend to follow a specific method of id numbering.

Once I got the configuration file done and tested the software to see if it would even run properly on Windows XP (it did!), I called the CEO back and told him I had a laptop ready to go for system 5. I drove out to Hollywood and the CFO (who was there with the CEO) had to walk about a mile out of the security zone to meet me and pick up the laptop.

I told her I put a fresh install of the data acquisition software on the laptop and it's already configured for system 5 - it *should* just work once you plug it in.

I didn't get any phone calls after dropping off the laptop, so I called the CFO once I got home and asked her if everything was working okay. She told me it worked flawlessly - it was Plug 'n Play so to speak. She even said she was impressed, she thought she'd have to call me to iron out one or two configuration issues to get it talking to the meters.

All in all, crisis averted! At work on Monday, my supervisor told me that my name was Mud that day (by the CEO), but I still work here!

Here's a picture of the inside of system 8 (similar to system 5 - same hardware)

6pm - arrive home from work, log into my computer and start working on side projects.

4am - Finally go to sleep after staying up all night setting up arch in a vm.

7am - Start drive to work in the snow and ice.

7:20am - car runs out of wiper fluid.

7:30am - round corner so that I’m driving towards the sun, windshield is covered in mud and I have 2% visibility.

7:35am - take off ramp towards gas station so I can buy fluid and wash window.

7:36am - Car mysteriously parked in center of off ramp, nearly smash it but have a narrow miss.

7:40am - can’t find the freaking pully in new car to pop hood

7:41am - found it.

7:50am - drove the back way to work because it cuts out traffic, but includes many steep hills that I forgot existed, come to a skid at bottom of one and am pushed out into the main road, luckily nobody is coming and I’m able to continue on my merry way.

8:01am - sit down in desk, lead staff person comes over evoking Lumbergh from Office Space and lets me know I need to be on time to work and that the snow doesn’t give me an excuse. I agree and smile and suck up and he leaves.

8:02am - pull out phone to write down notes about personal project that I thought of on drive here, phone dies. I forgot to plug it in last night.

8:04am - found power bank charger thing in desk but it uses a micro-b type usb and I only have usb type c on me.

8:10am - borrow usb from old headset in office surplus.

8:11am - writing notes. Have sudden realization that I didn’t shut down my vm and that when my computer went to sleep and subsequently locked it probably halted virtualbox and everything would be lost for the second time.

8:12am - got on devRant.

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!

Before iPads took over the general population of home computing, I used to do house calls to help people with their computers for some extra folding money. One day I get a call from a regular saying that ever since I last worked on his computer it won't stay on.

He says it comes on for a few seconds, then just shuts down. It never did that before I upgraded the RAM.

So I drive over to his house and turn on the computer. He says, "See, it starts fine, but in a few seconds it'll just shut off. Just watch"

The computer boots up without any issues.

He says, "Well, of course it doesn't do it now that you're here!"

I reboot it a few times, boots fine every time. Suddenly I realize what's going on. I say to him, "Hey, why don't you try turning it on for me?"

He says, "What difference will that make?"

I say, "Just trust me, turn it on."

He bends down, presses the power button, looks up at the monitor and watches it boot. But he doesn't release the button! He just keeps holding it down until it shuts off.

"See!" he says, "why does it only do that when I turn it on!"

I then have to explain to him how holding down the power button forces a shutdown.

But, it never did that before I worked on it!

My first job: The Mystery of The Powered-Down Server

I paid my way through college by working every-other-semester in the Cooperative-Education Program my school provided. My first job was with a small company (now defunct) which made some of the very first optical-storage robotic storage systems. I honestly forgot what I was "officially" hired for at first, but I quickly moved up into the kernel device-driver team and was quite happy there.

It was primarily a Solaris shop, with a smattering of IBM AIX RS/6000. It was one of these ill-fated RS/6000 machines which (by no fault of its own) plays a major role in this story.

One day, I came to work to find my team-leader in quite a tizzy -- cursing and ranting about our VAR selling us bad equipment; about how IBM just doesn't make good hardware like they did in the good old days; about how back when _he_ was in charge of buying equipment this wouldn't happen, and on and on and on.

Our primary AIX dev server was powered off when he arrived. He booted it up, checked logs and was running self-diagnostics, but absolutely nothing so far indicated why the machine had shut down. We blew a couple of hours trying to figure out what happened, to no avail. Eventually, with other deadlines looming, we just chalked it up be something we'll look into more later.

Several days went by, with the usual day-to-day comings and goings; no surprises.

Then, next week, it happened again.

My team-leader was LIVID. The same server was hard-down again when he came in; no explanation. He opened a ticket with IBM and put in a call to our VAR rep, demanding answers -- how could they sell us bad equipment -- why isn't there any indication of what's failing -- someone must come out here and fix this NOW, and on and on and on.

(As a quick aside, in case it's not clearly coming through between-the-lines, our team leader was always a little bit "over to top" for me. He was the kind of person who "got things done," and as long as you stayed on his good side, you could just watch the fireworks most days - but it became pretty exhausting sometimes).

Back our story -
An IBM CE comes out and does a full on-site hardware diagnostic -- tears the whole server down, runs through everything one part a time. Absolutely. Nothing. Wrong.

I recall, at some point of all this, making the comment "It's almost like someone just pulls the plug on it -- like the power just, poof, goes away."

My team-leader demands the CE replace the power supply, even though it appeared to be operating normally. He does, at our cost, of course.

Another weeks goes by and all is forgotten in the swamp of work we have to do.

Until one day, the next week... Yes, you guessed it... It happens again. The server is down. Heads are exploding (will at least one head we all know by now). With all the screaming going on, the entire office staff should have comped some Advil.

My team-leader demands the facilities team do a full diagnostic on the UPS system and assure we aren't getting drop-outs on the power system. They do the diagnostic. They also review the logs for the power/load distribution to the entire lab and office spaces. Nothing is amiss.

This would also be a good time draw the picture of where this server is -- this particular server is not in the actual server room, it's out in the office area. That's on purpose, since it is connected to a demo robotics cabinet we use for testing and POC work. And customer demos. This will date me, but these were the days when robotic storage was new and VERY exciting to watch...

So, this is basically a couple of big boxes out on the office floor, with power cables running into a special power-drop near the middle of the room. That information might seem superfluous now, but will come into play shortly in our story.

So, we still have no answer to what's causing the server problems, but we all have work to do, so we keep plugging away, hoping for the best.

The team leader is insisting the VAR swap in a new server.

One night, we (the device-driver team) are working late, burning the midnight oil, right there in the office, and we bear witness to something I will never forget.

The cleaning staff came in.

Anxious for a brief distraction from our marathon of debugging, we stopped to watch them set up and start cleaning the office for a bit.

Then, friends, I Am Not Making This Up(tm)... I watched one of the cleaning staff walk right over to that beautiful RS/6000 dev server, dwarfed in shadow beside that huge robotic disc enclosure... and yank the server power cable right out of the dedicated power drop. And plug in their vacuum cleaner. And vacuum the floor.

We each looked at one-another, slowly, in bewilderment... and then went home, after a brief discussion on the way out the door.

You see, our team-leader wasn't with us that night; so before we left, we all agreed to come in late the next day. Very late indeed.

Lamer rant

For a really long time I said to myself that this is too basic to rant about but lately it became so frequent and extreme that here is my rant about completely clueless users that ask me IT related questions.

Disclaimer: Said users are people that I generally can't avoid. Distant family members, neighbors and etc.

Case 0:
U: I don't know what's happening!! The computer doesn't work!!
M: What do you mean?
U: There's no Facebook! And everything is stuck and no messenger!!!
M: The WiFi on your laptop was off. I turned it on. Still, this doesn't mean that the pc wasn't working.
U: I don't understand this shit!!!

Case 1:
U: I hate this computer!!! It never works!!! Help meeee!!!
M: What now?
U: Where did the internet disappear?!
M: (assuming it's wifi or browser related)
Actually user moved the Chrome window to bottom-right corner and lost it.

Every time I try to show the user how I resolve the issue the user yells that there are too many steps, that they are complicated and that I'm a bad teacher and doing it too fast.

Case 2:
U: My computer is so slow! It barely can load google translate! And I can't listen to music on youtube!! Shitty laptop! It's you! Your computers in the apartment drain everything!!!
M: You have no idea what you are talking about.
U: My husband told me that your computers are heavy and drain everything!
M: What exactly did he tell you that my devices drain?
U: I don't know! All the energy! I believe him! He knows!
M: My computers drain less electricity than your vacuum and I have a separate internet connection. Not only we share nothing but also I drain nothing.
U: Since you appeared all the computers are slow!!!!

Fkk...

Case 3:
U: I don't understand, where is my whatsapp?
M: You can't locate the app on your phone?
U: Yes! F*ck, help me! I'm so angry and I really need this NOW!!!
M: Shut up. I'm already here and helping.
(I open users phone and whatsapp is the active app...)
U: I can' t find my whatsapp with Clara!

F*ck you! F*ck you! Ghckjfshij!!!

Case 4:
(crazy hitting on my door)
U: I don't have THE internet!!!
It's you again! You took all of THE internet!!!
M: No, it doesn't work like that. Your provider is bad, your package is cheap and your cables are of low quality.
U: I need THE internet immediately!!! Stop playing with your typing and fix the facebook or I'll cut the power cables to the house!!

I can go on, just don't think that recalling all those events is healthy for me.

84 hours. Took alot of coffee and adderall. Had 5 projects with reasonable deadlines until mother fucking hurricane Katrina decided it wanted to be the best cocksucking blowing bitch around and knocked power out for two weeks. I managed to get 3 projects finished before i passed out for a day but two clients got pissed off cause their projects were late. They were pissed off even more when i had to pull the Forced Majeure clause cause they wanted to be bitches and didn't want to pay for my work

TL;DR: Hurricane didn't kill me so deadlines tried

Android : devRant is consuming too much power in background
Me : Say what ??
A : I said devRant is consuming too much pow.................
M : Who the fuck told you to rant about it
*Turns the phone off

No one speaks ill of devRant and lives long enough to tell about it.

*goes on site looking for free anime to stream*

Site: *popup* we noticed you're using an ad blocker! Please turn it off to continue using our site!

Me, an intellectual: *opens chrome developer tools, finds the HTML for the popup, opens its corresponding CSS and adds display: none; continues watching anime blissfully, without popups and ads*

Who said being a developer wasn't a super power?

Was coding so nicely, then I accidentally kicked the power strip and turned off my machine... Fuuuuuuuuuuuuuu!!!!!!!!!

Where do I even start?

Personal projects?
So many. Shouldn't count.

Unpaid game dev intern?
Unpaid game dev volunteer?
Both worthwhile, if stressful. Shouldn't count either.

Freelancing where clients refused to pay?
That's happened a few times. One of them paid me in product instead of cash (WonderSoil, a company that [apparently still] makes and sells some expanding super potting soil thing). The product turned out to be defective and killed all of the plants I used it on. I'd have preferred getting stiffed instead. Their "factory" (small, almost tiny) was quite cool. The owner was a bitch. Probably still is.

Companies that have screwed me out of pay?
So many. I still curse their names at least once a month. I've been screwed out of about $13k now, maybe more. I've lost track.

I have two stories in particular that really piss me off.

The first: I was working at a large robotics company, and mostly enjoyed my job, though the drive was awful. The pay wasn't high either, but I still enjoyed the work. Schedule was nice, too: 28 hours (four 7-hour days) per week. Regardless, I got a job offer for double my salary, same schedule, and the drive was 11 minutes instead of 40. I took it. My new boss ended up tricking me into being a contractor -- refused to give me a W2, no contracts, etc. Later, he also increased my hours to 40 with no pay increase. He also took forever to pay (weeks to months), and eventually refused to pay me to my face, in front of my cowokers. Asshole still owes me about $5k. Should owe me the the difference in taxes, too (w2 vs 1099) since he lied about it and forced me into it when it was too late to back out.

I talked to the BBB, the labor board, legal council, the IRS (because he was actively evading taxes), the fire inspector (because he installed doors taht locked if the power went out, installed the exit buttons on the fucking ceiling, and later disconnected all of said exit buttons). Nobody gave a single shit. Asshole completely got away with everything. Including several shady as hell things I can't list here because they're too easy to find.

The second one:
The economy was shit, and I was out of a job. I had been looking for quite awhile, and an ex-coworker (who had worked at google, interestingly) suggested I work for this new startup. It was a "reverse search engine," meaning it aggregated news and articles and whatnot, and used machine learning to figure out what its users are interested in, and provided them with exactly that. It would also help with scheduling, reminders of birthdays, mesh peoples' friends' travel plans and life events, etc. (You and a friend are going on vacation to the same place, and your mutual friend there is having a birthday! You should go to ___ special event that's going on while you're all there! Here's a coupon.) It was pretty cool. The owner was not. He delayed my payments a few times, and screwed me over on pay a few more times, despite promising me many times that he was "not one of those people." He ended up paying me less than fucking minimum wage. Fake, smiling, backstabbing asshole.

The first one still pisses me off more, though, because of all the shit I went through trying to get my missing back pay, and how he conned me every chance he got. And how he yelled at me and told me, to my face, that he wasn't ever going to pay me. Fucking goddamn hell I hate that guy.

I woke up today with my power off, dad forgot to pay the bill

WTF.jpg

I get home from work all stoked to code to learn that he didn't get it straightened out

Phones on 10% so i cant even read pdfs or surf Kodi

And im spending the last bit of electricity i own to bitch about it

Pay your bills devs

《WHAT IT'S LIKE TO BE A DEVELOPER IN ZIMBABWE》

Working on my project and suddenly power cuts off

Laptop doesn't have a battery
So it instantly shuts down

Ohh snap !!!

Luckily I've set my Vs Code to auto save every 3seconds

[Sigh..]

I'm getting ridiculously pissed off at Intel's Management Engine (etc.), yet again. I'm learning new terrifying things it does, and about more exploits. Anything this nefarious and overreaching and untouchable is evil by its very nature.

(tl;dr at the bottom.)

I also learned that -- as I suspected -- AMD has their own version of the bloody thing. Apparently theirs is a bit less scary than Intel's since you can ostensibly disable it, but i don't believe that because spy agencies exist and people are power-hungry and corrupt as hell when they get it.

For those who don't know what the IME is, it's hardware godmode. It's a black box running obfuscated code on a coprocessor that's built into Intel cpus (all Intell cpus from 2008 on). It runs code continuously, even when the system is in S3 mode or powered off. As long as the psu is supplying current, it's running. It has its own mac and IP address, transmits out-of-band (so the OS can't see its traffic), some chips can even communicate via 3g, and it can accept remote commands, too. It has complete and unfettered access to everything, completely invisible to the OS. It can turn your computer on or off, use all hardware, access and change all data in ram and storage, etc. And all of this is completely transparent: when the IME interrupts, the cpu stores its state, pauses, runs the SMM (system management mode) code, restores the state, and resumes normal operation. Its memory always returns 0xff when read by the os, and all writes fail. So everything about it is completely hidden from the OS, though the OS can trigger the IME/SMM to run various functions through interrupts, too. But this system is also required for the CPU to even function, so killing it bricks your CPU. Which, ofc, you can do via exploits. Or install ring-2 keyloggers. or do fucking anything else you want to.

tl;dr IME is a hardware godmode, and if someone compromises this (and there have been many exploits), their code runs at ring-2 permissions (above kernel (0), above hypervisor (-1)). They can do anything and everything on/to your system, completely invisibly, and can even install persistent malware that lives inside your bloody cpu. And guess who has keys for this? Go on, guess. you're probably right. Are they completely trustworthy? No? You're probably right again.

There is absolutely no reason for this sort of thing to exist, and its existence can only makes things worse. It enables spying of literally all kinds, it enables cpu-resident malware, bricking your physical cpu, reading/modifying anything anywhere, taking control of your hardware, etc. Literal godmode. and some of it cannot be patched, meaning more than a few exploits require replacing your cpu to protect against.

And why does this exist?
Ostensibly to allow sysadmins to remote-manage fleets of computers, which it does. But it allows fucking everything else, too. and keys to it exist. and people are absolutely not trustworthy. especially those in power -- who are most likely to have access to said keys.

The only reason this exists is because fucking power-hungry doucherockets exist.

Dear tech YouTubers, fucking stop trying to justify the iPad pro as an actual pro device that can replace a laptop for everyone...

Yes you can make music, yes you can draw and yes you can watch content...

Can you have multiple windows?
Can you write code and natively compile?
Can I use a mouse?
Can I power multiple displays with seperate apps?

Yes it's powerful but it's still an iPad, just because you made a bigger screenee phone doesn't mean you can claim it as a full PC replacement... Cunts -,-

(Would like to point this out mostly to Johnathan Morrison for that video showing off a single person using the iPad for a singular purpose, pissed me off more than anything!)

THIS is why unit testing is important, I often see newbs scour at the idea of debugging or testing:
My high school cs project, i made a 2d game in c++. A generic top down tank game. Being my FIRST project and knowing nothing about debugging or testing and just straight up kept at it for 3 months. Used everything c++ and OOP had to offer, thinking "It works now, sure will work later"

Fast forward evaluation day i had over 5k lines of code here, and not a day of testing; ALL the bugs thought to themselves- "YOU KNOW WHAT LETS GUT THIS KID "
Now I did see some minor infractions several times but nothing too serious to make me refactor my code. But here goes

I started my game on a different system, with a low end processor about 1/4 the power of mine( fair assumption). The game crashed in loading screen. Okay lets do that again. Finally starts and tanks are going off screen, dead tanks are not being de-spawned and ended up crashing game again. Wow okay again! Backround image didn't load, can only see black background. Again! Crashed when i used a special ability. Went on for some time and i gave up.

Prof saw the pain, he'd probably seen dis shit a million times, saw all the hard work and i got a good grade anyways. But god that was embarrassing, entire class saw that and I cringe at the thought of it.
I never looked at testing the same way again.

I was in a public place on my laptop, and my laptop went into hibernation to save battery. I switched it back on and then the laptops BIOS came up saying that the battery was critically low, nothing bad here.

Instead of clicking continue, I decided to press "Diagnostics" instead. The diagnostics immediately began to run in the BIOS.

The screen began to show different coloured bars and patterns, obviously a screen test. Then a prompt appeared asking me if coloured bars were displayed. The options were yes and no, and a button saying "Exit" in the top right. Me, not wanting to do a full diagnostics on such a low battery, pressed exit.

The screen turned black, and then flashed red. The beeper on the motherboard began to beep at an ear-piercing volume. It sounded as if it was a bomb about to go off. Everyone around me stared and some people began to even panic. I tried switching it off by holding the power button but nothing was happening. People were just staring all around me.

After about 10 seconds, the beeping stopped and the screen displayed an error message similar to this:
"CRITICAL ERROR: Monitor test FAILED.
No user input was provided."

Moral of the story: Make your program account for all possible options.

*sees that the high voltage generator kit got delivered today*
Cool, let's build this thing and integrate it into my old bugzapper! Mosquitos beware 😈

*starts building the kit, all is going very well*
Oh wow, isn't it Monday? But it's taking only 15 minutes of soldering and everything goes super smooth.. what divine power is giving me such good luck?

Alright, last thing, the transformer and then this circuit is done!!!

*solders in the transformer without realizing that the wires are coated, and the solder isn't protruding through*
Fuck. Time to desolder this shit and blast the wires with my lighter to flash that coating right off!

*engages solder pump and solder goes off extremely easily, because it only adhered to the pad*
*takes off transformer*
Me: "Nnngh..!!! Get off you piece of junk!!!"
Transformer: "Hmph!! I will stay in here no matter what!"
Me: "Get the fuck off already!!! 😡"
Transformer: *leads break off* "Alright, but these leads stay here!!!"
Me: "MotherFUCKER!!!"

Yep, it's Monday after all.

So the other day my mother told me that her laptop does not start. Then we found out that she holds the "power" button so long that the laptop turned off again after a few seconds after the boot was initiated.

The man who runs my IT department. The man who is in charge of all things and people that are technical: IT management software development, infrastructure, training, help desk, system administration​, etc. A man with a staff of fifty plus. If you were to peel back the flesh on this man's head and crack open his skull you would find dung beetles feasting on the feces that power his thoughts and motor functions. Underneath this foul membrane, if you could push past the maggots; the meal worms; his undying love for hourly binges of Johnny Walker Black on any day of the week with a name that contains a vowel; his fascination with shiny objects and his endless internal monologue wondering when they would hatch rainbow ponies that fly; his desire whenever he enters a paint store to open all the cans of paint and taste the different colors; if you could push past all of the vile crap that exists where Thomas Aquinas once theorized there was a soul, you would find a colony of paramecia at the end of their short lives laughing hysterically at how much smarter they were than the host they lived in.

This man was in charge of hiring the Manager of Software Development. The manager I report to. After seven months of ignoring this chore; after interviewing the sum total of four candidates; after making a point to tell myself and a colleague that there was no one qualified to fill this position within our company (an opinion that is both untrue and, when spoken, runs afoul of internal hiring policies) this man hired a soulless cretin with no experience in software development or with running a software development group. A man who regularly confuses web servers and SQL servers. A man who asked me how my previous manager reviewed my work, was told by me that said previous manager read my code, and then replied in his capacity as the manager of software development that "looking at code is a compete waste of time for a manager." A man so without any humanity or reason for being that he will sit silently, creepily, in conference rooms with the lights off waiting for meetings to begin. Meetings he has scheduled. That have no reason for being in the first place. Just like himself.

Shortly before the man in charge offered the Dev Manager job to the simulacrum of human flesh that is my manager, he met with me and others who had been involved in the interview process. When I informed him that hiring someone with no technical knowledge for a very technical position would be a mistake that he would suffer through for years, he replied in reference to his future hire that "his managerial experience makes up for his lack of technical knowledge."

Best. Prank. Ever. Worst prank ever too. Fuck.

Wow... this is the perfect week for this topic.

Thursday, is the most fucked off I’ve ever been at work.

I’ll preface this story by saying that I won’t name names in the public domain to avoid anyone having something to use against me in court. But, I’m all for the freedom of information so please DM if you want to know who I’m talking about.

Yesterday I handed in my resignation, to the company that looked after me for my first 5 years out of university.

Thursday was my breaking point but to understand why I resigned you need a little back story.

I’m a developer for a corporate in a team of 10 or so.

The company that I work for is systemically incompetent and have shown me this without fail over the last 6 months.

For the last year we’ve had a brilliant contracted, AWS Certified developer who writes clean as hell hybrid mobile apps in Ion3, node, couch and a tonne of other up to the minute technologies. Shout out to Morpheus you legend, I know you’re here.

At its core my job as a developer is to develop and get a product into the end users hands.

Morpheus was taking some shit, and coming back to his desk angry as fuck over the last few months... as one of the more experienced devs and someone who gives a fuck I asked him what was up.

He told me, company want their mobile app that he’s developed on internal infrastructure... and that that wasn’t going to work.

Que a week of me validating his opinion, looking through his work and bringing myself up to speed.

I came to the conclusion that he’d done exactly what he was asked to, brilliant Work, clean code, great consideration to performance and UX in his design. He did really well. Crucially, the infrastructure proposed was self-contradicting, it wouldn’t work and if they tried to fudge it in it would barely fucking run.

So I told everyone I had the same opinion as him.

4 months of fucking arguing with internal PMs, managers and the project team go by... me and morpheus are told we’re not on the project.

The breaking point for me came last Wednesday, given no knowledge of the tech, some project fannies said Morpheus should be removed and his contract terminated.

I was up in fucking arms. He’d done everything really well, to see a fellow developer take shit for doing his job better than anyone else in [company] could was soul destroying.

That was the straw on the camels back. We don’t come to work to take shit for doing a good job. We don’t allow our superiors to give people shit in our team when they’re doing nothing but a good job. And you know what: the opinion of the person that knows what they’re talking about is worth 10 times that of the fools who don’t.

My manager told me to hold off, the person supposed to be supporting us told me to stand down. I told him I was going to get the app to the business lead because he fucking loves it and can tell us if there’s anything to change whilst architecture sorts out their outdated fucking ideas.

Stand down James. Do nothing. Don’t do your job. Don’t back Morpheus with his skills and abilities well beyond any of ours. Do nothing.

That was the deciding point for me, I said if Morpheus goes... I go... but then they continued their nonsense, so I’m going anyway.

I made the decision Thursday, and Friday had recruiters chomping at the bit to put the proper “senior” back in my title, and pay me what I’m worth.

The other issues that caused me to see this company in it’s true form:
- I raised a key security issue, documented it, and passed it over to the security team.
- they understood, and told the business users “we cannot use ArcGIS’ mobile apps, they don’t even pretend to be secure”
- the business users are still using the apps going into the GDPR because they don’t understand the ramifications of the decisions they’re making.

I noticed recently that [company] is completely unable to finish a project to time or budget... and that it’s always the developers put to blame.

I also noticed that middle management is in a constant state of flux with reorganisations because in truth the upper managers know they need to sack them.

For me though, it was that developers in [company], the people that know what they’re talking about; are never listened to.

Fuck being resigned to doing a shit job.

Fuck this company. On to one that can do it right.

Morpheus you beautiful bastard I know you’ll be off soon too but I also feel I’ve made a friend for life. “Private cloud” my arse.

Since making the decision Thursday I feel a lot more free, I have open job offers at places that do this well. I have a position of power in the company to demand what I need and get it. And I have the CEO and CTO’s ears perking up because their department is absolutely shocking.

Freedom is a wonderful feeling.

I have this little hobby project going on for a while now, and I thought it's worth sharing. Now at first blush this might seem like just another screenshot with neofetch.. but this thing has quite the story to tell. This laptop is no less than 17 years old.

So, a Compaq nx7010, a business laptop from 2004. It has had plenty of software and hardware mods alike. Let's start with the software.

It's running run-off-the-mill Debian 9, with a custom kernel. The reason why it's running that version of Debian is because of bugs in the network driver (ipw2200) in Debian 10, causing it to disconnect after a day or so. Less of an issue in Debian 9, and seemingly fixed by upgrading the kernel to a custom one. And the kernel is actually one of the things where you can save heaps of space when you do it yourself. The kernel package itself is 8.4MB for this one. The headers are 7.4MB. The stock kernels on the other hand (4.19 at downstream revisions 9, 10 and 13) took up a whole GB of space combined. That is how much I've been able to remove, even from headless systems. The stock kernels are incredibly bloated for what they are.

Other than that, most of the data storage is done through NFS over WiFi, which is actually faster than what is inside this laptop (a CF card which I will get to later).

Now let's talk hardware. And at age 17, you can imagine that it has seen quite a bit of maintenance there. The easiest mod is probably the flash mod. These old laptops use IDE for storage rather than SATA. Now the nice thing about IDE is that it actually lives on to this very day, in CF cards. The pinout is exactly the same. So you can use passive IDE-CF adapters and plug in a CF card. Easy!

The next thing I want to talk about is the battery. And um.. why that one is a bad idea to mod. Finding replacements for such old hardware.. good luck with that. So your other option is something called recelling, where you disassemble the battery and, well, replace the cells. The problem is that those battery packs are built like tanks and the disassembly will likely result in a broken battery housing (which you'll still need). Also the controllers inside those battery packs are either too smart or too stupid to play nicely with new cells. On that laptop at least, the new cells still had a perceived capacity of the old ones, while obviously the voltage on the cells themselves didn't change at all. The laptop thought the batteries were done for, despite still being chock full of juice. Then I tried to recalibrate them in the BIOS and fried the battery controller. Do not try to recell the battery, unless you have a spare already. The controllers and battery housings are complete and utter dogshit.

Next up is the display backlight. Originally this laptop used to use a CCFL backlight, which is a tiny tube that is driven at around 2000 volts. To its controller go either 7, 6, 4 or 3 wires, which are all related and I will get to. Signs of it dying are redshift, and eventually it going out until you close the lid and open it up again. The reason for it is that the voltage required to keep that CCFL "excited" rises over time, beyond what the controller can do.

So, 7-pin configuration is 2x VCC (12V), 2x enable (on or off), 1x adjust (analog brightness), and 2x ground. 6-pin gets rid of 1 enable line. Those are the configurations you'll find in CCFL. Then came LED lighting which required much less power to run. So the 4-pin configuration gets rid of a VCC and a ground line. And finally you have the 3-pin configuration which gets rid of the adjust line, and you can just short it to the enable line.

There are some other mods but I'm running out of characters. Why am I telling you all this? The reason is that this laptop doesn't feel any different to use than the ThinkPad x220 and IdeaPad Y700 I have on my desk (with 6c12t, 32G of RAM, ~1TB of SSDs and 2TB HDDs). A hefty setup compared to a very dated one, yet they feel the same. It can do web browsing, I can chat on Telegram with it, and I can do programming on it. So, if you're looking for a hobby project, maybe some kind of restrictions on your hardware to spark that creativity that makes code better, I can highly recommend it. I think I'm almost done with this project, and it was heaps of fun :D

TL;DR: disaster averted!

Story time!

About a year ago, the company I work for merged with another that offered complementary services. As is always the case, both companies had different ways of doing things, and that was true for the keeping of the financial records and history.

As the other company had a much larger financial database, after the merger we moved all the data of both companies on their software.

The said software is closed source, and was deployed on premises on a small server.

Even tho it has a lot of restrictions and missing features, it gets the job done and was stable enough for years.

But here comes the fun part: last week there was a power outage. We had no failsafe, no UPS, no recent backups and of course both the OS and the working database from the server broke.

Everyone was in panic mode, as our whole company needs the software for day to day activity!

Now, don't ask me how, but today we managed to recover all the data, got a new server with 2 RAID HDDs for the working copy of the DB, another pair for backups, and another machine with another dual HDD setup for secondary backups!

We still need a new UPS and another off site backup storage, but for now...disaster averted!

Time for a beer! Or 20...

That is all :)

*listens to some music over the Bluetooth headset in Groove on Windows*
*walks off to the bathroom*
> Please recharge headset
…
Which in Sony-speak means "reached cut-off voltage, you'd better recharge this fucking thing because we will power off now, rendering the warning completely useless!*
Me: "oh dear it's 5:30AM and my speakers are set to full blast"

*rushes off to the bedroom to pause Groove*
*walks back to the bathroom*

Then I started thinking, you know Microsoft.. on my phones I never had this issue since the Samsung Corby. Android has supported pausing media playback on headset disconnect for about a decade now. Maybe Microsoft Certified Enganeers could look at how the competition has solved an issue and IMPLEMENT THE FUCKING FEATURE ALREADY?!

But no, you've got that IE reputation to hold high. Sorry, I forgot.

MICROSHIT!!!!!!

Fuck China.

Fuck the U.S. government.

Fuck the UK and Australia and all the other governments for taking advantage of the crisis of the last two years to get more power and money for their elites.

Fuck them all for starting COVID with their unsanctioned and unethical “gain of function” lab experiments and creating so much chaos that nobody really has a chance anymore at living the life they had dreamed of or so carefully planned for.

Fuck them for the out of control spending and money printing and inflation and even messing around with trying to regulate and tax crypto so we don’t have any kind of escape valve to live a normal, happy life.

Because of them, I can’t even enjoy my time off work. Even if I could plan a vacation that wouldn’t have to be canceled due to an outbreak or resultant supply chain issues, I can’t travel without severe restrictions that make it miserable and not worth the trouble.

Fuck them for making everyone into stupid monkeys fighting over opinions about data that is incomplete, misunderstood, misrepresented, or downright fixed toward a specific pharma-fascist authoritarian outcome.

And fuck them especially for being hypocrites and going to parties and generally not following their own rules they made for us when they think we’re not watching, and then persecuting and prosecuting us when we dare do the same.

Fuck ‘em all. I’m so done.

so here's a little story:

yesterday i decided to buy a shiny new gtx 1070 since my pc is getting very old, i come back from the store and i realize that my case is slightly too small to fit the card.
'No bg deal' i think to myself, i run out to buy a saw and after some work i made some space to fit the card in by sawing off some hard drive bays i was not using. I plug in the card, i wire up the pc, and it does not boot: after some asking around (i have never really built a pc before), i relaize i need more power to the card and wire a second PCIE connector. low and behold, i power of the pc and it works! Once logged into windows tho, i realize none of my HHDs are detected...

To cut a long story short, i **did not think to unplug the hard drives before i started sawing off bits of the case and the vibrations killed both of them!** i lost ~1TB of data in the process: a lot of it was games and programs, but i have yet to tally up the damage.

I am completely bamboozled by what the fuck just happened, i think i'll go hand myself in to the nearest police station for crimes against technology... or maybe a mental clinic would be best?...

PS: my system drive was spared since its an SSD, but i may as well re-install windows at this point since i lost 90% of my software

This is my most ridiculous meeting in my long career. The crazy thing is I have witnessed this scenario play out many times during my career. Sometimes it sits in waiting for a few years but then BOOM there it is again and again. In each case the person that fell into the insidious trap was smart and savvy but somehow it just happened. The outcomes were really embarrassing and in some cases career damaging. Other times, it was sort of humorous. I could see this happening to me and I never want it to happen to you.

Once upon a time in a land not so far away there was a Kickoff Meeting for an offsite work area recovery exercise being planned for our Oklahoma locations. Eleven Oklahoma high ranking senior executives were on this webinar plus three Enterprise IT Directors (Ellen, Jim and Bob) who would support the business from the systems side throughout the exercise.

The plan was for Sam Otto, our Midwest Director of Business Continuity to host this webinar. Sam had hands-on experience recovering to our third party recovery site vendor and he always did a great job. He motivated people to attend the exercise with the coolest breakfasts and lunches you could imagine. Donuts, bagels, pizza, wings, scrumptious salads, sandwiches, beverages and desserts. He was great with people and made it a lot of fun.

At the last minute Charles 'Don't Call Me Charlie' Ego-Smith, the Global Business Continuity Senior Vice President, decided to grand-stand Sam. He demanded the reins to the webinar. Pulled a last-minute power-play and made himself the host and presenter. You have probably seen the move at some point in your career. I guess the old saying, 'be careful what you wish for' has some truth to it - read on and let me know if you devRanters agree...

So, Charlie, I mean Charles, begins hosting the session and greets all of the attendees. Hey, good so far! He starts showing some slides in the PowerPoint presentation and he fields a few questions, comments and requests from the Oklahoma executives. The usual easy to handle requests such as, 'what if we are too busy to do recover all systems', 'what if we recover all of our processes from home', 'what if we have high profile visitors that month?' Hey you can't blame them for trying. You are probably thinking to yourself, 'been there - heard that!' But luckily our experienced team had anticipated the push-back. Fortunately, Senior Management 'had our backs' and committed that all processes and systems must participate and test - so these were just softball requests, 'easy-peasy' to handle. But wait, we are just getting started!

Now the fireworks begin. Bob, one if the Enterprise IT directors started asking a bunch of questions. Well, Charles had somewhat of a history with Bob from previous exercises and did not take kindly to Bob's string of questions. Charles started getting defensive and while Bob was speaking Charles started IM'ing. He's firing off one filthy message after another to me and our teammate Sam.

'This idiot Bob is the biggest pain in the ass that I ever worked with'; 'he doesn't know shit', 'he never shuts the f up', 'I wanna go over to his office and kick his f'in ass...!'

Unfortunately...the idiot Charles had control of the webinar and was sharing his screen so every message he sent was seen by all of the attendees! Yeah, everyone including Bob and the Senior Oklahoma executives! We could not instant message him to stop as everyone would have seen our warnings, so we tried to call Charles' cell phone and text him but he did not pick up. He just kept firing ridiculously embarrassing dirty IM messages and I guess we were all so stunned we just sat there bewildered. We finally bit the bullet and IM'ed him to STOP ALREADY!!! Whoa, talk about an embarrassing silence!

I really felt sorry for Bob. He is a good guy. Deservedly, Charlie 'Yes I am going to call you CHARLIE' got in big time hot water after the webinar with upper management. For one reason or another he only lasted another year or so at our company. Maybe this event played a part in his demise.

So, the morale is, if you use IM - turn it off during a webinar if you are the host. If you must use it, be really careful what you say, who you say it to and pray nothing embarrassing or personal is sent to you for everyone to see.

Quick Update - During the past couple of months I participated on many webinars with enterprise software vendors trying to sell me expensive solutions. Most of the vendors had their IM going while doing webinars and training. Some very embarrassing things came flying across our screens. You learn a lot reading those messages when they pop-up on the presenters' screen, both personal and business related. Some even complaints from customers!

My advice to employees and vendors is to sign-out of IM before hosting a webinar. Otherwise, it just might destroy your credibility and possibly your career.

Turning off your pc by holding down the power button is like putting yourself to sleep every night by shooting yourself in the face with a tranquilizer gun

Disclaimer: I have a strong hate towards apple for multiple reasons and this will only be temporary. (thank God for that)

My oneplus one is battery dead and the power button quit as well. Repair costs would be as expensive as buying a new phone (200-300 price range) so searching for a new one.

But, I need a temporary phone in the mean time.
A phone with googled-android is absolutely a no-go. I used to do that sometimes but those were wrong decisions.

So, for the sake of trying, I'm going for a second hand iPhone.
Will be testing how it works for me (never been able to form an opinion on it since iOS 4.2 (iPod touch)) and will also be searching my ass off for a smartphone which supports lineage/rooting (TIPS BETWEEN ABOVES PRICE RANGE ARE VERY WELCOME) because I'm fucking hell not planning on using that (the iPhone) fucker any longer than a month.
Even if I love it over android (highly doubt that), I won't continue using it for very specific reasons.

Wish me luck 😅

There is power cut in my college area sometimes...
Once we were in computer lab, when power cut occurred. So fan, tubelights went off.
I heard one girl ask her friend "how are laptops on?"
That moment.... Only I know how I controlled my laugh....

Drunk Dev 1: These wifi signals are really take toll of brain tissues and may probably cause brain cancer. 🙁

Drunk Dev 2: Let’s power off our wifi router. We don’t need wifi while drinking. 😏

Drunk Dev 1: Good, but what about other wifi signals in proximity. Your neighbours ?? 🤨

Drunk Dev 2: Oh poor, they wont get into our brains as our brains don’t have password for their wifi thus, we can’t connect to their access point 😎

Drunk Dev 1: 😳

Good morning everyone^^
I just heard my company is doinig some weird shit.
1. We RECOMMEND doing backups on a USB stick (our customers get a cheap giveaway when they purchase our products).
2. We sell farm controllers with less power than a fucking arduino as "Top Notch technology". (single core 1Mhz, 128MB RAM)

We Devs are not supposed to understand this logic. We shall only "make it faster". If proper solutions are suggested it gets shrugged off as "expensive".

ARGH. I wrote a long rant containing a bunch of gems from the codebase at @work, and lost it.

I'll summarize the few I remember.

First, the cliche:
if (x == true) { return true; } else { return false; };
Seriously written (more than once) by the "legendary" devs themselves.

Then, lots of typos in constants (and methods, and comments, and ...) like:
SMD_AGENT_SHCEDULE_XYZ = '5-year-old-typo'

and gems like:

def hot_garbage
magic = [nil, '']
magic = [0, nil] if something_something
success = other_method_that_returns_nothing(magic)
if success == true
return true # signal success
end
end

^ That one is from our glorious self-proclaimed leader / "engineering director" / the junior dev thundercunt on a power trip. Good stuff.

Next up are a few of my personal favorites:

Report.run_every 4.hours # Every 6 hours
Daemon.run_at_hour 6 # Daily at 8am

LANG_ENGLISH = :en
LANG_SPANISH = :sp # because fuck standards, right?

And for design decisions...

The code was supposed to support multiple currencies, but just disregards them and sets a hardcoded 'usd' instead -- and the system stores that string on literally hundreds of millions of records, often multiple times too (e.g. for payment, display fees, etc). and! AND! IT'S ALWAYS A FUCKING VARCHAR(255)! So a single payment record uses 768 bytes to store 'usd' 'usd' 'usd'

I'd mention the design decisions that led to the 35 second minimum pay API response time (often 55 sec), but i don't remember the details well enough.

Also:
The senior devs can get pretty much anything through code review. So can the dev accountants. and ... well, pretty much everyone else. Seriously, i have absolutely no idea how all of this shit managed to get published.

But speaking of code reviews: Some security holes are allowed through because (and i quote) "they already exist elsewhere in the codebase." You can't make this up.

Oh, and another!
In a feature that merges two user objects and all their data, there's a method to generate a unique ID. It concatenates 12 random numbers (one at a time, ofc) then checks the database to see if that id already exists. It tries this 20 times, and uses the first unique one... or falls through and uses its last attempt. This ofc leads to collisions, and those collisions are messy and require a db rollback to fix. gg. This was written by the "legendary" dev himself, replete with his signature single-letter variable names. I brought it up and he laughed it off, saying the collisions have been rare enough it doesn't really matter so he won't fix it.

Yep, it's garbage all the way down.

TL;DR: check polarity before plugging your DIY circuits into others!!!

*goes off to watch some Lucky Star and drink some booze*
*notices phone battery dying after 3rd pint*

But my charging cable that Huawei delivered with this thing is way too short... Well that ain't no problem, I can make one of my own 😎

But I'm tipsy.. sound I really enter the workbench in this state?

*goes off to build a charging cable anyway*
But what was USB-A male connector's polarity again? Oh, there's the fan's USB connector that I've made in the past. Let's check on that one. So, left is positive and right is negative?

*solders the wires on*
Snip, strip, stick, done! Well that was easy. I guess that all those failed soldering attempts and lost pads in the past as a means of training did pay off in the end!

*plugs phone into Raspberry Pi media center through new charging cable*

Strange sounds coming from the speakers.. well that's odd. Reverse polarity or maybe the Pi can't handle a 1A load from my phone?

*plugs phone into the 5V 5A charging hub that I've made earlier*
That oughta do.. current limits should be no more in that thing.

*charging hub makes high-pitch noise similar to the Pi speakers*
Definitely a reverse polarity, isn't it :') let's check on the Gargler...
Oh shit! It is a reverse polarity mistake!!! Should've checked this earlier >_<

*resolders wires properly*
Alright, finally done.. as I'm writing this post, my phone's charging from the Raspberry Pi through my fixed charging cable now...

Lesson learned. Always check on the internet what the pinout is before soldering anything, don't solder while tipsy, and be fucking grateful that this phone has reverse polarity protection in it.

Nexus 6P with all its shortcomings regarding power delivery and battery management, luckily it's got reverse voltage protection features built-in. Otherwise it might've costed me my phone. Always double-check before plugging anything into something else!!!

Current project has a ridiculously high amount of formal requirements

Two of them literally are
• the system shall have an “off” state
• the system shall be in the “off” state if no power is supplied

Boy do I have just the solution for you!

I've just disassembled this LED floodlight that I bought a while ago. It's some stupid little cheapie from a dollar store, so I figured that there'd be shit inside. But I wanted that LED cob.. a power LED :3

Well, shit wasn't too far off from the truth. The component choice is reasonable, but the design of the bloody thing.. batshit insane. The LED floodlight is powered by 4 AAA batteries, connected in series. So 6VDC. That then goes into this little tactile pushbutton, into the LED cob and then a 4.7 ohm resistor.

Well that's a pretty easy circuit.. let's remove the batteries and the casement, and put it on the lab bench power supply. Probes connected to the circuit with only the resistor and the LED cob in between (I didn't want to deal with the switch). Power supply set to 6V, current limiting to 500mA, contact!! And it works, amazing! So I let it run for a while to see that nothing gets too hot.. hah. After a minute or so, smoke would come out.. LED cob was a bit warm to the touch but nothing too bad. But the resistor.. I could cook water on it if I wanted to! 100 fucking °C, and rising. What the F yo?!

So I figured that I didn't want to put the resistor in between there. Just the LED cob now, which apparently has a forward voltage somewhere between 3.2V and 3.3V depending on how I set the current (500mA and 600mA respectively). Needed a bigger heatsink though, so I jammed one of my aluminium heatsinks on there. And it worked great! Very bright too, as it takes between 1.6 and 2W of power. Just for a comparison, the lighting in my living room is 4x5W and the ones on top of my dining table are 2x3W (along with some TL bar that my landlord put there.. fluorescent I think). So yeah, 2W is quite a lot for an LED, especially when it's all concentrated into one tiny spot.

That said, back to the original design with the resistor. 2 questions I have for that moron that designed this crap. First, why use a resistor for a power LED?! They needlessly waste power, and aren't good choices for anything that consumes more than 100mA. You should use PWM for these purposes, or tune your voltage on the supply side. Second, why go with 6V when your forward voltage is 3.3 at most? Wouldn't it make more sense to use 3 batteries with 4.5V? Ah, but I know the answer to the second one. AAA cells aren't rated for high loads like this. So that's likely why the alkaline cells that I had in there before have started leaking. Thanks, certified piece of shit!

Honestly, consumer electronics are such a joke... At least there's some components that I can salvage from this crap. Mainly the LED cob, but also the resistor and the tactile pushbutton perhaps.

One last remark that I'd like to make. This floodlight was cheap garbage. But considering that you can't do it well at that price, you just shouldn't do it. You know why? Because consumers always go for the cheapest. Makes a lot of money to build at rock bottom prices and make shit, but it damages the whole industry, since now the good designs will go out of business. That's why consumer electronics is so full of crap nowadays. Some unethical profiteering gluttons saw money, and they replaced the whole assortment with nothing but garbage. I'm sure that there's a special place in hell for that kind of people.

Most of things I'm about to say are experienced by almost 99% of developers in Africa including my country so I'm going to make it a more general rant.

As an African developer, life is both exciting and frustrating at the same time. Some of the challenges that make life difficult for developers in Africa include:

1). Slow Internet Speed: The internet in Africa can be extremely slow and unreliable, making it frustrating to work on projects that require large file downloads. This is a serious challenge for freelance developers who work from home.

2). Unstable Electricity: Frequent power outages due to inadequate infrastructure, insufficient investment in energy production and distribution, and political instability makes it difficult for developers in Africa to work consistently. Most times I get frustrated because you can experience black out at anytime of the day which could last for hours to days automatically rendering you useless if you have no power backup generator at home.

3). Low Pay: While the opportunities for software developers in Africa are quite high, the salary is often disappointing. Many talented programmers end up seeking better opportunities overseas. In fact I quit my full-time job because of this reason.

4). Lack of Support for Tech Start-ups: There are few venture capital firms in Africa willing to invest in new ideas, which makes it difficult for tech start-ups to get off the ground. It's just sad, you can have an idea and just die with it.

So in summary, it's not a walk in the park to be a developer in Africa, but despite all of that I am glad to be a part of the African journey, having the opportunity to had work at a tech agency firm on various projects ranging from healthcare to finance, I find it rewarding to know that my work has contributed to a better future for my continent. 🤞

So I host a few mining pools and some of the stories we hear from miners can be quite interesting. One of our miners recently had his front door busted off the hinges and a drug bust team go into his house and turn the house upside down. How did they determine that he was a threat for growing illegal drugs? Well he had a high power bill because of the miners and he grows flowers and food inside of his house and that was enough for THE NYPD to get a warrant.

Now he is responsible for cleaning up the mess the police made. What scares me the most is that they are tracking soil you buy online along with high power bills. What the hell USA im a proud Canadian

TLDR; My 2TB HDD got wiped in one fell swoop by a 9-year old child.

You know... I've never been too great about keeping backups. Even to this day, I only keep one or two local backups and nothing on the "cloud".

So this was about 5 years ago. At the time, I was living together with my girlfriend - who would later become my wife. She had a son from a previous relationship, who at the time was 9 years old.

I had a small desk in the living room of our one-bedroom apartment, that I used for my computer, which has been a laptop for a long time now. One unfortunate thing about the layout of the apartment was that the wall plug near my desk was attached to a light switch.

I had a 2TB external hard drive - with its own power cable - plugged into my laptop. Then, things started to move in slow motion... The GF's son comes inside from playing, my GF asks him to turn off the light. He reaches over, and shuts off power to my laptop - and the external hard drive.

He must have hit that switch at JUST the right fucking time. The laptop ran on battery, no big deal. The hard drive, when I powered it back up - was wiped clean. I tried data recovery on it, but the HDD was encrypted, which makes things more complicated.

Needless to say, I was not happy. I never got that data back, but I did learn not to expose my hard drives to 9 year olds. Very dangerous little creatures.

You want to know the best part? He destroyed another hard drive of mine, a few years later. Should I tell that story?

Years ago, I was part of a project that went completely off the rails. A little context: we were a services company and we had local offices in cities all over the country. My team provided 2nd-level support which means we often had the PMs call us from those via an annoying Nextel radio.

I won’t go through the details but suffice it to say this project envolved one such branch going rogue and committing actual fraud, with criminal proceedings and all. People were on the edge, and the relationship with that branch was increasingly hostile. There was also an internal power struggle in the company between some directors at that point. In other words, a clusterfuck I’ll always cherish, if by cherish you mean hate hate hate. Anywho…

One time, there was a national holiday on a Thursday and we were going to make it a long weekend. As customary, I communicated with all the PMs about contigency plans. This PM then told us that we could not take Friday off because the customer wanted us to fly over there. We were supposed to be at the customer’s site early Friday morning. That meant we would have to fly Thrusday afternoon. I wasn’t happy.

It immediatly felt arbitrary too. As I said, the relationship was not good and we suspected he was just trying to cost us our days off. I knew enough of the customer to be fairly sure they would not have requested us that Friday. Why did the customer want us then? There was nothing yet on production and if it was just to show progress, surely we could move it to Monday. At worst, can’t we make it over the phone? No, no, no, he said. The customer was adamant that we be there on Friday. Sucked to be us.

So we flew over Thursday afternoon and on Friday morning we headed to the customer’s offices only to find it closed. They too had made it a long weekend and wouldn’t be back until Monday.

Normally I would be furious over the waste of time but to be honest, both I and my colleague smiled at that. It confirmed that the PM just tried to screw us and the customer have never asked for us. We headed back to the local office.

Before coming in, we both bought ourselves some icecream. My friend stayed in the little garden in front and I went in. The PM immediatly saw me and demanded to know why I wasn’t at the customer yet. I didn’t answer. Instead I grabbed the Nextel radio and headed back out with the PM following. I then sat down on the grass and called my director. Smiling and staring at the PM, I told him about the office being closed. The PM’s face froze when my director asked to talk to him.

We sat outside under the sun, enjoying our icecreams while the PM got shouted at. It was the best icecream I’ve ever had.

My call team lost power. If our major clients try to call and can't, we're fucked. My boss isn't helping and I can't do shit about it without him, he just keeps saying they need to get power. The people they need for that aren't answering. How fucking difficult is it to stop jerking off long enough to help them out so we don't get fucked out of egregious amounts of money.

You know what, fuck microshit to fuck town and back again.

What part of disabling "allow the computer to turn of this device to save power"

DO YOU NOT FUCKIJG UNDERSTAND!

MY FUCKING USB'S ARE GOING FUCKING MENTAL SWITCHING ON AND OFF LIKE A DRUNKEN HOBO YOU COCK FUCKS.

my week is a complete and utter shit of a week as it is, I don't need this bullshit on top of it too.

#Microsoft, fix your fucking shit already!

Power-out inspired pi project!

Just a simple flashlight. Brightness and color can be controlled by the joystick. It runs off a phone battery pack

Why does almost everyone act as if the world they live in is perfect, or is supposed to be perfect?

This is about approaching IT infrastructures, but goes way beyond IT, into daily lives.

Daniel Kahneman wrote about the "Econs" - a mythical creature that behaves according to rules and rational thoughts, that everybody is guided by, as opposed to Humans, who are irrational, intuitive and emotional.
My beef is with a wider perception, beyond economical analysis, profit, investment and so on.

Examples:
Organization A uses a 15 year old system that is crappy beyond description, but any recent attempt to replace it have failed. Josh thinks that this is a crappy organization, any problem lies within the replacement of that system, and all resources should be devoted to that. Josh lives in a perfect world - where shit can be replaced, where people don't have to live with crappy systems. Josh is stupid, unless he can replace that old system with something better. Don't be Josh. Adapt to the fucking reality, unless you have the power to change it.

Peter is a moron who downloads pirated software with cracks, at the office. He introduced a ransomware that encrypted the entire company NAS. Peter was fired obviously, but Sylvia, the systems administrator, got off easily because Peter the moron was the scapegoat. Sylvia truly believes that it's not her fault, that Peter happened to be a cosmic overgrown lobotomized amoeba. Sylvia is a fucking idiot, because she didn't do backups, restrict access, etc. Because she relied on all people being rational and smart, as people in her imaginary world would be.

Amit finished a project for his company, which is a nice modern website frontend. Tom, the manager says that the website doesn't work with Internet Explorer 8, and Amit is outraged that Tom would even ask this, quoting that IE8 is a dinosaur that should've been euthanized before even hatching. Amit doesn't give a shit about the fact that 20% of the revenue comes from customers that use IE8, what's more important to him is that in his perfect imaginary world everybody uses new hardware and software, and if someone doesn't - it's their fault and that's final. Amit is a fucking asshole. Don't be like Amit.

React to the REAL world, not what you WANT the world to be. Otherwise you're one of them.
The real world can be determined by looking at all the fuck ups and bad situations, admit that they happen, that they're real, that they will keep happening unless you do something that will make them impossible to happen or exist.

Acting as if these bad things don't exist, or that they won't exist because someone would or should change it, is retarded.

Did I every tell you about that time I scared a boss (not mine, he was in the room) so much, that he was to scared to enter my office for the next couple of weeks? 😅
Good times 😊

Tl;dr: He was the reason I was working at max capacity and then he started complaining that shit wasn't working.

Full story:
I was out of office, building up a new site. I was the only IT working that day, others were out on vacation.
Suddenly I start getting flooded with calls from other sites, that nothing works. It is so bad, that my boss can't reach me on the company phone, so he calls me on my private phone.
Apparently all the servers are down.
So me into a taxi, heading for the main office.
When I get there I just start booting the servers on by one, because they didn't like that they had lost power. While I'm working, my boss is standing there, ready to help.
Another boss enters the office and goes: "I can't access Navision". To which I quickly reply something like: "Well everything is down, I'm the only one who can fix it and I'm working as fast as I can".
Two weeks later, another employee tells me, that the other boss has been running all his equipment off a battery backup, since the failure, because his power cord failed. He spilled a cup of coffee on it and therefore was the reason, that all the servers lost power (bad setup, I know). And apparently I was so frightening that he didn't have the courage to ask for a new power cord 😂
Best thing was that my boss never stopped me or told me that I did something wrong.

Do not shut down or power off the machine...
Window update (1/999999) :)

I wish people that made desktop apps would consider cpu and ram usage. "Oh I've just opened... ...let me index your vendor folder and check that I need to update at the same time whilst you only have 20% cpu left and 2GB of RAM remanding :D" no; fuck off. Why don't you wait until there's enough CPU power left to check for your update?

Fuck startups.

Back when I was an wee lad I interviewed for an startup, not knowing that startups are not real companies. The scumbag interviewer, who was also the owner of the outfit, asked me what I was looking in a company. I said "fair wages, a non-antagonic environment and projects with real roadmaps".
He asked me to elaborate. I said, "You know, if today your product is a sales platform, I do not want to come into work next week and discover it is now an air travel tickets marketplace, or come back the very next day and discover it is now an automated pizza factory, or in the next day and it is now a crypto exchange..."

The scumbag looked PISSED. "Sorry, but we are looking for someone who likes the challenges of a dynamic environment (read: we do not have a business model and we hate the very idea of trying to make money out of our company), and you do not fit the profile"

Startups are not real companies, i.e. they do not systematically charge money in exchange for goods or services in amounts that exceed the cost of providing said goods or services. Most startups are just tax fronts for money laundering schemes. The rest are just playthings for rich assholes who can't get a real output-producing job. Those two categories are not mutually exclusive.

Take Facebook, for example. The poster child of startups. The Zucker that owns it just announced they are setting impossible performance targets on purpose, not even attempting to hide the fact that it is just a way to lay off large quantities of employees without using the words "massive lay offs". Companies, real thin-margin, lots-of-regulation profit-driven companies do not do that. They are not some sort of "capitalist woke", real CEOs just know that if their companies largely miss performance targets on their tenure, purposely or not, next it will be their neck on the chopping block. Because they can be fired if the KPI charts say they suck. But the Zucker cannot be fired, not even after commanding their beanbag and tap beer offices to be heated exclusively by burning hundred dollar bills.
So the Zucker is not interested in performance. Not even in lay offs as expense cutting measures - investors are an infinite source of free money for startups. The Zucker just wants to project power, especially now that engineers are not so confident in the stability of they high-paying jobs.

So are irrelevant 500-souls-or-less self-aggrandizing startups. Their owners are there because it is in vogue to have a startup or ten. And will have that startup pivot to whatever sounds fancy that season. After all, only poor people care about things like EBITDA and profit margins repeatability - A.K.A. "getting more money".

Fuck startups.

So probably about a decade ago at this point I was working for free for a friend's start-up hosting company. He had rented out a high-end server in some data center and sold out virtualized chunks to clients.

This is back when you had only a few options for running virtual servers, but the market was taking off like a bat out of hell. In our case, we used User-Mode Linux (UML).

UML is essentially a kernel hack that lets you run the kernel in user space. That alone helps keep things separate or jailed. I'm pretty sure some of you can shed more light on it, but that's as I understood it at the time and I wasn't too shabby at hacking the kernel when we'd have driver issues.

Anyway, one of the ways my friend would on-board someone was to generate a new disk image file, mount it, and then chroot to that mount path. He'd basically use a stock image to do this and then wipe it out before putting it live.

I'm not sure exactly what he was doing at the time, but I got a panicked message on New Years Day saying that he had deleted everything. By everything, he had done an rm -fr /home as root on what he had thought was the root of a drive image.

It wasn't an image. It was the host server.

In the stoke of a single command, all user data was lost. We were pretty much screwed, but I have a knack for not giving up - so I spent a ton of time investigating linux file recovery.

Fun fact about UML - since the kernel runs in user space as a regular ol' process, anything it opens is attached to that process. I had noticed that while the files were "gone", I could still see disk usage. I ended up finding the images attached to their file pointers associated with each running kernel - and thankfully all customers were running at the time.

The next part was crazy, and I still think is crazy. I don't remember the command, but I had to essentially copy the image from the referenced path into a new image file, then shutdown the kernel and power it back on from the new image. We had configs all set aside, so that was easy. When it finally worked I was floored.

Rinse and repeat, I managed to drag every last missing bit out of /proc - with the only side effect being that all MySQL databases needed to be cleaned up.

!rant
Four hours of work.
You think you write spaghetti code? I write spaghetti wires.
H-Bridge dual motor tester for stepper motors.
Speed is controled by pot.
H-bride are L293D.
My third board, and the first that won't go to the trash.

Question. With the baterry off the motor continues spinning with the 5v from arduino.
My question is, is the L293D suposed to do that? Or do I have a short circuit somewhere that is giving power to the motor? Meaning it can burn the arduino.
Runs a 12v stepper from a CD-Rom driver perfectly at 5v from the arduino and actually starts to act strange when I turn the 12v on. (maby the circuit it's adding 12v + 5v?)

A friend of mine called yesterday with a HUUGEEE FUCKIN PROBLEM!! His work on his thesis (to finish his course) is inside his laptop, and "the laptop is stuck at 91% of updates" since.. Like.. 5h. "It won't turn on again! I'm dead!! Pleeeaase heeelp"
I went to his home, sit at the front of his PC, took off the battery and the power cable, shut it off and then turned it on again.
"OH! MY! GOD!!!" "You truly are a fuckin God with this!!"
"Dude. You're just stupid."
Ps. I'm still his friend, I guess

Dear Laptop manufacturers,
Why the FUCK would you place the power button where the 'Delete' should be? Just so that you accidentally can turn off your pc while typing? Fuck you.

If anyone know a good laptop that is thin and light, 14" and has the power button outside of the keyboard area, please tell me.

Pattern I'm noticing...

*email* Hey, can you help me with my code, I don't know why it's not working...*end email*

no comments. if you wrote the shit and don't know what the blazes it's doing, how am i supposed to know what you broke? I'm not a mind reader, I don't know what you were thinking when you wrote the code.

true, I could go through and read it and try to figure it out, but then i'll be cranky and much less likely to want to help you in the future because you're causing unnecessary work, and part of my job is to get you ready for work environments, and I WILL DO EVERYTHING IN MY FUCKING POWER TO MAKE YOU THE ONE PERSON THAT EVERYONE DOESN'T HATE, BUT I WILL HATE YOU FOREVER BECAUSE YOU'RE PISSING ME THE HELL OFF.

When I go to bed, I power off my laptop instead of just closing the lid. I don't bring my phone with me. I don't have a smartwatch. I sleep with no electronic devices with me.

Anyone can solve a lot of their problems by conversing with themselves one on one. Instead, they prefer a feed algorithm taking away their pain. But the nature of pain-relieving addictions is that they always intensify the pain in the long run.

Listen to yourself. Speak to yourself quietly, one on one, without mark zuckerberg in your room listening to your every word. The overwhelming pain will be no more after mere minutes. Only then can you be free.

Got a CTO at my Unity job that's younger than me, which by itself is fine, but the only reason this guy was put into that position was because the previous CTO left the company at the time where I was relatively new and he is the person most familiar with the codebase of our primary project than I was at the time.

I understood the decision at the time, but still, having a position of power being handed to them just as a matter of inheritance doesn't command my respect. Nevertheless, I withheld my judgement at the time to see how his leadership goes.

Not even 1 year in and this young CTO started making jabs at me, calling my code hard to read and incomprehensible, to my face, in front of everybody else.

Motherfucker, I don't find his code easy to read either but I went out of my way to frequently ask him, the previous CTO and other teammates to clarify what they wrote here and there. He on the other, made no attempt to ask me for clarification and instead waited until company meetings to air these grievances.

Our boss started to ask me to follow SOLID principles (even though he can't recite what that acronym means) due to complaint from the CTO guy, even though the CTO guy doesn't even follow SOLID himself! But I took the higher road and didn't flip it right back on him.

What I did propose in return though, is that the dev team start using pull requests and have a code review process if the CTO wants to sign off on everything that gets in the codebase. Sounds reasonable enough, right? Not for this guy! He immediately starts complaining that reviewing pull requests would be more work for him. Motherfucker, you refused to go to my table to ask for clarifications about my code yet still want to understand what goes on, then do code review.

It was at this point that I realized that this guy doesn't actually want me to write good, clear code. He wants me to write code HIS way so that he can understand. Yeah okay, I can accept that idea in isolation. Some open-source projects require contributors to follow certain coding convention to make the maintainers' job easier too. One project that immediately came to mind is "In-game Debug Console for Unity 3D" (disclosure: I am a contributor to this project)

But guess what?

THIS COMPANY DOESN'T HAVE A FREAKING CODING CONVENTION. NOT WRITTEN DOWN ANYWHERE. NOT EVEN A VOCAL ONE.

What this CTO guy wants from me is a complete blackbox.

To all fellow devs out there, I hope you don't work with a CTO like this, or become one.

Working on my Lenovo x1 carbon. Akku warning "less then 6%" appears. No problem, I will connect the cable just after I finished this function... "Will shutdown in a view moments" message appears. Ok, I connect the cable. Nothing happens. Maybe power adapter is broken or something more worst. Panic. Try to commit and push as fast as I can (around 2000 LOC from today, made big changes on my project today). While pushing to github laptop powers off. Fuck. Check github on smartphone to see if commits had been pushed. No. I do not have a power adapter for replacement. FML.

My company is providing cloud infrastructure to our customers. For research purposes we are running a little openstack cloud in our laboratory datacenter were we can test stuff before implementing it in the productive environment.

Last week the manager asked me to shut down the cluster over night and only power on the servers when we need it. (about twice a week)

The reason: it produces too much heat.

My answer was: No.
First off thats not how cloud infrastructure works, and how about a proper climate control?

Sometimes i ask myself in which parallel universum our managers live 😑

So today I realized that Im not happy.

When I was a kid I wanted to do many things because I had time and energy but I had no money. Now that Im an adult and I have the money, I have no energy and no will power to try and have personal life in these few hours left of my day. I spend 9 hours at work everyday and totally 1hr 30min is wasted on commuting.

I spent 4 years in uni between lectures and working on my side projects, and I really believed that after uni I will get a job and my life work balance will improve.

After uni I spent 2 years working abroad in 3 jobs at 3 countries. I work as android dev and now Im making a really decent salary.

However Im not happy at all. I realized that life is not about the money. Im changing countries like socks and dont even feel the need to socialize or enjoy my life anymore. Im european and these other eu countries are not that different at all. It came to a point where relationships are meaningless to me. I became an office drone who cares only about work and outside of work I care only about my projects and more work.

At this point im only 25 years old with around 2 years of experience and money is really good, but fuck it Im so tired of being an emigrant and having no stability in life. Im so drained. I spent past 6 years (4 in uni combined with side projects and 2 years working in 3 jobs in different countriee) working my ass off and lying to myself that after the next big thing Im gonna take a break and enjoy life. But its never enough. I dont want to hit 30s or 40s and realize that I wasted my life on pursuing money and didnt get to enjoy life..

Im really considering taking a 6-12 months vacation. I need to find myself. Probably going back to my own country. Just learn how to enjoy life, attend workshops, get to know new city area, meet new people, do some interesting hobbies. Maybe do a little freelance (max 10hrs a week).

Im tired of feeling like I need to make as much money as I can and learn as much about my work as I can. Its not rewarding because its never enough.

Whats the point in that money if I cant enjoy it?

Come in to work to find my PC is off, power cut in the night. Now I need to reload everything.
#DeveloperProblems

So... People até talking about windows update crash??
Omg....
It crashed on me after updating... I was late to bed so just pressed the doom button (power off)... Because I was coming on vacation next morning...
Still thinking about what's expecting me after I return

Sometimes, being the only fullstack dev with access to a lot of systems gives you the ability to introduce functionality that:

A) prevents future errors

B) introduces new validations to users to make sure A) is prevented.

C) apply these changes to different projects

But most importantly...

D) without a single person in management getting involved or having to sign it off.

It's like running a company you own, but without owning it.

Granted with such power, comes the trust and responsibility of deploying changes with the adequate testing being done prior and handling change management, but fuck, sometimes I wonder if "god mode" for lack of a better term, is too much, or just enough to get the job done without the politics.

Just now I realized that for some reason I can't mount SMB shares to E: and H: anymore.. why, you might ask? I have no idea. And troubleshooting Windows.. oh boy, if only it was as simple as it is on Linux!!

So, bimonthly reinstall I guess? Because long live good quality software that lasts. In a post-meritocracy age, I guess that software quality is a thing of the past. At least there's an option to reset now, so that I don't have to keep a USB stick around to store an installation image for this crap.

And yes Windows fanbois, I fucking know that you don't have this issue and that therefore it doesn't exist as far as you're concerned. Obviously it's user error and crappy hardware, like it always is.

And yes Linux fanbois, I know that I should install Linux on it. If it's that important to you, go ahead and install it! I'll give you network access to the machine and you can do whatever you want to make it run Linux. But you can take my word on this - I've tried everything I could (including every other distro, custom kernels, customized installer images, ..), and it doesn't want to boot any Linux distribution, no matter what. And no I'm not disposing of or selling this machine either.

Bottom line I guess is this: the OS is made for a user that's just got a C: drive, doesn't rely on stuff on network drives, has one display rather than 2 (proper HDMI monitor recognition? What's that?), and God forbid that they have more than 26 drives. I mean sure in the age of DOS and its predecessor CP/M, sure nobody would use more than 26 drives. Network shares weren't even a thing back then. And yes it's possible to do volume mounts, but it's unwieldy. So one monitor, 1 or 2 local drives, and let's make them just use Facebook a little bit and have them power off the machine every time they're done using it. Because keeping the machine stable for more than a few days? Why on Earth would you possibly want to do that?!!

Microsoft Windows. The OS built for average users but God forbid you depart from the standard road of average user usage. Do anything advanced, either you can't do it at all, you can do it but it's extremely unintuitive and good luck finding manuals for it, or you can do it but Windows will behave weirdly. Because why not!!!

Saw a rant about a teacher so I thought I'd share one of my experiences.

So I had this teacher who was supposed to teach us the basics of web development (HTML, CSS and some basic PHP).
Now this guy didn't really like me very much but that is besides the point.
One day me and a classmate were working on an assignment in class, we ran into a problem but we couldn't find the mistake in the code. So we went to ask the teacher. We explain the whole thing, the teacher stares at our code for a good couple minutes (while the problem can only be in a few lines) and then says something along the lines off: "I don't like that you put your curly brackets on the same line as the if statement, fix that first and then come back"

Needless to say, my classmate and I were standing there with our minds blown.

He knew nothing about PHP, all he did was read out power points.
On top of that, a quick LinkedIn search proved that he normally works as PM an that he has no coding experience!

WHY WAS THIS DUDE FUCKING HIRED????

Who remembers time when you actually had to press power button in order to turn your computer off?

Seen some YouTube video the other day with kids nowadays told to work on an old computer with I think win95 and no one figured out what the cryptic "You can now turn your computer off" meant :-)

Game Streaming is an absolute waste.

I'm glad to see that quite a lot of people are rightfully skeptical or downright opposed to it. But that didn't stop the major AAA game publishers announcing their own game streaming platforms at E3 this weekend, did it?

I fail to see any unique benefit that can't be solved with traditional hardware (either console or PC)

- Portability? The Nintendo Switch proved that dedicated consoles now have enough power to run great games both at home and on the go.

- Storage? You can get sizable microSD cards for pretty cheap nowadays. So much so that the Switch went back to use flash-based cartridges!

- Library size/price? The problem is even though you're paying a low price for hundreds of games, you don't own them. If any of these companies shut down the platform, all that money you spent is wasted. Plus, this can be solved with backwards compatibility and one-time digital downloads.

- Performance on commodity hardware? This is about the only thing these streaming services have going for it. But unfortunately this only works when you have an Internet connection, so if you have crap Internet or drop off the network, you're screwed. And has it ever occurred to people that maybe playing Doom on your phone is a terrible UX experience and shouldn't be done because it wasn't designed for it?

I just don't get it. Hopefully this whole fad passes soon.

Didn't had to fix anything (so far). But took my dev laptop to show all the projects I've been working on to the dad of my girlfriend and he showed me his projects.
He's not mainly a dev, but an electrical ingenieur. He designs his own pcb boards (with 8bit processors on them, as "that's more than enough power to do almost anything!") and then programs that stuff with basic (he writes his own firmware for it).
He also creates desktop application to get data off the devices using Delphi.

Love that guy and have a shittln of respect for him!

I do not like the direction laptop vendors are taking.

New laptops tend to feature fewer ports, making the user more dependent on adapters. Similarly to smartphones, this is a detrimental trend initiated by Apple and replicated by the rest of the pack.

As of 2022, many mid-range laptops feature just one USB-A port and one USB-C port, resembling Apple's toxic minimalism. In 2010, mid-class laptops commonly had three or four USB ports. I have even seen an MSi gaming laptop with six USB ports. Now, much of the edges is wasted "clean" space.

Sure, there are USB hubs, but those only work well with low-power devices. When attaching two external hard drives to transfer data between them, they might not be able to spin up due to insufficient power from the USB port or undervoltage caused by the impedance (resistance) of the USB cable between the laptop's USB port and hub. There are USB hubs which can be externally powered, but that means yet another wall adapter one has to carry.

Non-replaceable [shortest-lived component] mean difficult repairs and no more reserve batteries, as well as no extra-sized battery packs. When the battery expires, one might have to waste four hours on a repair shop for a replacement that would have taken a minute on a 2010 laptop.

The SD card slot is being replaced with inferior MicroSD or removed entirely. This is especially bad for photographers and videographers who would frequently plug memory cards into their laptop. SD cards are far more comfortable than MicroSD cards, and no, bulky external adapters that reserve the device's only USB port and protrude can not replace an integrated SD card slot.

Most mid-range laptops in the early 2010s also had a LAN port for immediate interference-free connection. That is now reserved for gaming-class / desknote laptops.

Obviously, components like RAM and storage are far more difficult to upgrade in more modern laptops, or not possible at all if soldered in.

Touch pads increasingly have the buttons underneath the touch surface rather than separate, meaning one has to be careful not to move the mouse while clicking. Otherwise, it could cause an unwanted drag-and-drop gesture. Some touch pads are smart enough to detect when a user intends to click, and lock the movement, but not all. A right-click drag-and-drop gesture might not be possible due to the finger on the button being registered as touch. Clicking with short tapping could be unreliable and sluggish. While one should have external peripherals anyway, one might not always have brought them with. The fallback input device is now even less comfortable.

Some laptop vendors include a sponge sheet that they want users to put between the keyboard and the screen before folding it, "to avoid damaging the screen", even though making it two millimetres thicker could do the same without relying on a sponge sheet. So they want me to carry that bulky thing everywhere around? How about no?

That's the irony. They wanted to make laptops lighter and slimmer, but that made them adapter- and sponge sheet-dependent, defeating the portability purpose.

Sure, the CPU performance has improved. Vendors proudly show off in their advertisements which generation of Intel Core they have this time. As if that is something users especially care about. Hoo-ray, generation 14 is now yet another 5% faster than the previous generation! But what is the benefit of that if I have to rely on annoying adapters to get the same work done that I could formerly do without those adapters?

Microsoft has also copied Apple in demanding internet connection before Windows 11 will set up. The setup screen says "You will need an Internet connection…" - no, technically I would not. What does technically stand in the way of Windows 11 setting up offline? After all, previous Windows versions like Windows 95 could do so 25 years earlier. But also far more recent versions. Thankfully, Linux distributions do not do that.

If "new" and "modern" mean more locked-in and less practical and difficult to repair, I would rather have "old" than "new".

My company has two offices in separate cities but they treat each the devs of each location very very differently.

In one office the devs get full power to experiment with whatever tech they want, they just stomp their feet and management gives em whatever they ask for, freedom of choice regarding anything they are working on, to be allowed to do greenfield work or experimental stuff

But in my office we are forced to do ONLY. Bug fixing and refactoring shitty code from over a decade a go, our tech is ancient and we are not allowed to to
Shit , anything we ask for is denied
And improvements to our process is shut down with the reasoning that whatever we got works so why meddle ??

For us , management is solely focussed on making sure we respond to support calls , deployments , configurations and little bug fixing. Basically they only care that we manage to finish for out next delivery.
No new work whatsoever!
If there is any hint of something new to to
Implemented the golden boys from the other office just stopm their feet tillmthey get it or just go off and start working on it then seek permission afterwards, with their much larger team they obviously get further than we do by the time management hears about it so they end up taking over the work since they already have more done already

My manager decided to push us to attend a company devCon to share ideas with our devs from our other location. This rapidly turned into a sour experience

Basically we do all shitty boring work which puts money on the table which goes straight to those idiots to play with...

They have the guts to laugh when we mentioned that we never get anything interesting to work on

Never seen so many of our devs looking up job sites on the bus back...
This is gonna blow up in management's face...

> Worst work culture you've experienced?

It's a tie between my first to employers.

First: A career's dead end.
Bosses hardly ever said the truth, suger-coated everything and told you just about anything to get what they wanted. E.g. a coworker of mine was sent on a business trip to another company. They had told him this is his big chance! He'd attend a project kick-off meeting, maybe become its lead permanently. When he got there, the other company was like "So you're the temporary first-level supporter? Great! Here's your headset".

And well, devs were worth nothing anyway. For every dev there were 2-3 "consultants" that wrote detailed specifications, including SQL statements and pseudocode. The dev's job was just to translate that to working code. Except for the two highest senior devs, who had perfect job security. They had cooked up a custom Ant-based build system, had forked several high-profile Java projects (e.g. Hibernate) and their code was purposely cryptic and convoluted.
You had no chance to make changes to their projects without involuntarily breaking half of it. And then you'd have to beg for a bit of their time. And doing something they didn't like? Forget it. After I suggested to introduce automated testing I was treated like a heretic. Well of course, that would have threatened their job security. Even managers had no power against them. If these two would quit half a dozen projects would simply be dead.

And finally, the pecking order. Juniors, like me back then, didn't get taught shit. We were just there for the work the seniors didn't want to do. When one of the senior devs had implemented a patch on the master branch, it was the junior's job to apply it to the other branches.

Second: A massive sweatshop, almost like a real-life caricature.
It was a big corporation. Managers acted like kings, always taking the best for themselves while leaving crumbs for the plebs (=devs, operators, etc). They had the spacious single offices, we had the open plan (so awesome for communication and teamwork! synergy effects!). When they got bored, they left meetings just like that. We... well don't even think about being late.
And of course most managers followed the "kiss up, kick down" principle. Boy, was I getting kicked because I dared to question a decision of my boss. He made my life so hard I got sick for a month, being close to burnout. The best part? I gave notice a month later, and _he_still_was_surprised_!
Plebs weren't allowed anything below perfection, bosses on the other hand... so, I got yelled at by some manager. Twice. For essentially nothing, things just bruised his fragile ego. My bosses response? "Oh he's just human". No, the plebs was expected to obey the powers that be. Something you didn't like? That just means your attitude needs adjustment. Like with the open plan offices: I criticized the noise and distraction. Well that's just my _opinion_, right? Anyone else is happily enjoying it! Why can't I just be like the others? And most people really had given up, working like on a production line.

The company itself, while big, was a big ball of small, isolated groups, sticking together by office politics. In your software you'd need to call a service made by a different team, sooner or later. Not documented, noone was ever willing to help. To actually get help, you needed to get your boss to talk to their boss. Then you'd have a chance at all.

Oh, and the red tape. Say you needed a simple cable. You know, like those for $2 on Amazon. You'd open a support ticket and a week later everyone involved had signed it off. Probably. Like your boss, the support's boss, the internal IT services' boss, and maybe some other poor sap who felt important. Or maybe not, because the justification for needing that cable wasn't specific enough. I mean, just imagine the potential damage if our employees owned a cable they shouldn't!

You know, after these two employers I actually needed therapy. Looking back now, hooooly shit... that's why I can't repeat often enough that we devs put up with way too much bullshit.

Recently I disassembled this Remington beard trimmer that I have, right. Thinking that I probably just depleted the battery or something like that, and that that's why the fucking thing would turn off after 10 seconds, with a miserable motor speed that could only be caused by what.. 2.5V or something like that? So I kept up with it for a while, and then a few days ago, I finally disassembled the fucking thing.

New 4.2V LiPo battery of my own attached, wicked! The thing has a 2Ah capacity and is fully charged, so fuck all in a big ship, I'ma shave my fucking hair without protection, who cares with 2Ah anyway, given that motors at 4.2V consume only 800-ish mA, right. So I shaved my head, and figured.. holy shit mate, I fucking beat this fucking cunt, fuck you Remington! Planned obsolescence my ass!!!

Just now @xewl sent me a request that made me reconsider this shaver. Some PS3 controller, should be easy enough to fix. But I referenced my shaver so I figured that I might actually check it beforehand.

The original fucking battery has 4V left on it. 4 fucking volts! That ain't gonna trip shit for an overdischarge protection circuit!!! WHY THE FUCK REMINGTON, WHY THE FUCK DID IT (IF ANYTHING) TRIP?! And more importantly, why did you make the motor turn for only 10-ish seconds after charging, 1 year after purchase, despite the fucking cell having 4 fucking volts in it, which is more than plenty to get the thing turning for at least a 60% charge?! Planned obsolescence perhaps, hmm?

But let's say that it was bad contacts or something like that. After all, my probing was a bit intermittent, showing 1.5V (if it's shorting, shouldn't it be in the mV range?) and then 4V at times, until I separated the nickel connectors from the 16500 cell. Why the fuck should that thing short, considering that it's unprotected?! The fucking cell is unprotected, and you Remington are going to let it short? What kind of fucking engineering is that, you fucking braindead morons?!!!

And why do you use a 16500 cell which isn't very standard over a 18650 cell, which is? Again, planned obsolescence? Fucking vile pieces of shit.

Now what's more.. I tried to power on the shaver for a picture for this fucking rant, using a LiPo cell of my own that I used to shave my hair with the other day, to get a nice picture of my little hack. But the fucking thing, despite having 3.89V left in it after that fucking shave, which is more than plenty for a lithium cell, the fucking unit doesn't power on. WHAT THE FUCK REMINGTON?!! That's planned obsolescence at its best, init?!! You vile fucking pieces of shit.

So I guess that this rant is no more one of "I beat these Remington cunts". It is one of "you can bet your fucking ass that planned obsolescence is a thing!!"

I started my internship at the end of the year..
Fuck my ass!!! This code I have to work with is a huge pile of shit.
The code base I need to work with is around 40k LOC. It is a mixture of C++, C, Java, Python, Bash and I think I saw some lonely js files around.

A list of awesome parts:
- Paths are hard coded.
- Redundant code everywhere
- No documentation or inline comments available

Most of the comments in the code are just old code that is not used anymore. But the cherry on the turd is the class that should provide all kind of useful functions in my daily routine. About ninety percent of the functions have the same description or nothing. Sometimes a function name says "readSomethingFromSomewhere" but instead it writes something to a file. It is really confusing and I need to check everything twice instead of rely on what the function name promises.
I have also learned why copy paste isn't that good. The brief descriptions of every method in a files are always the same.

getName() - Description: Fork child process
getIp() - Description: Fork child process
getIpv6() - Description: Fork child process.

Surprise: None of these functions forks a child process. :D

Another awesome feature is the thing that they store up to five different versions of libraries. Everyone with slight modifications but no hint which one you need to use. Sometimes it is the newest, sometimes the oldest which is running in production. Another case of try and error.
Oh and my dev machine is a potato with a power supply and a fan. I started with NetBeans and every time I compiled the code it sounds like the machine wants to lift off and leave for a better place. (At this point I switched to Emacs and everything runs smoothly now)

At first I thought that I'm just not that good at coding and understanding a big project from scratch but some colleagues have the same problem. The whole system is very inflexible and it is all about "std::cout"-debugging to check if your changes do what you want them to do.

Currently I'm just trying to fix this mess to make the life for the next student or employee easier. The first month was just frustrating as hell. I need to ask so many questions and most of the time the answer was "I don't know, haven't touched this code in years". Needless to say that my progress isn't that awesome but at least I get a nice payment for 20 hours of work a week.

Teaching my homeschooled son about prime numbers, which of course means we need to also teach prime number determination in Python (his coding language of choice), when leads to a discussion of processing power, and a newly rented cloud server over at digital ocean, and a search of prime number search optimizations, questioning if python is the right language, more performance optimizations, crap, the metrics I added are slowing this down, so feature flags to toggle off the metrics, crap, I actually have a real job I need to get back to. Oooh, I'm up to prime numbers in two millions, and , oh, I really should run that ssh session in screen so it keeps running if I close my laptop. I could make this a service and let it run in the background. I bet there's a library for this. He's only 9. We've already talked about encryption and the need to find large prime numbers.

So having gotten my hands on the books I need for the next semester I decided to go take a look at what's in them.

Now the first is mostly web stuff and the second is just about software design. It starts off with an introduction to HTML5, where they didn't really teach HTML5, more like they taught HTML3/4 but not in a way that was too dangerous. I can tolerate not having my semantic tags tbh. They also used spaces on both sides of the = for some reason.

Then a CSS chapter which was also surprisingly mediocre. They didn't use a dedicated CSS file, but I can live with that, for starters.

Then there were some surprisingly decent JS chapters. Although they did use newlines before their { kinda miffed me. There has also been a few developments since this books release, but tbh this isn't the worst case of outdatedness. (And at least they didn't use jquery when teaching JS)

Then a chapter on SQL which I ignored.

Then a chapter about PHP, and, uhm, when did this book get released? Well the ISBN is 978-0-13-215100-9 and using the power of Google we can reveal it was published in.. 2011..

I'm quite happy that I already know how to program

One of those days when i feel like complete shit and wish i hadn’t woken up.
I heard back from an interview i did last week (one of the faang type) and the recruiter started with “You didn’t impress any of your interviewers”. Man that hurt. I can’t unhear that. He went ahead to say they all recommended a mid-level role for me (they apparently said i had potential and could easily grow into a senior eng) instead of the senior lead i applied for. This is also subject to getting approval to hire mid-level engineers because the team needs more people but they only got approval to hire senior engineers. This cunt also added “dont worry about it. Just go about your usual business and i’ll call you next week if we have gotten the approval”. Ass! All i can do is worry because that is what i do best.
I think i am more sad and disappointed in myself because i thought the interviews went well. Wrote decent code and came up with good solutions on time. Had a good conversation with interviewers. Apparently for a senior, you cannot make mistakes which i did but once the interviewer gave me a clue, i got back on track.
Anyway, i slept with this anxiety, then woke up with tummy ache. On the drive out this morning to go to the bank, i drove my car into a pole and broke off my side mirror. Then my fucking power generator stopped working. And on my way to go and get my fixed mirror from the mechanic, my exhaust pipe broke in half due to a possible pothole i drove into.

Those fucking days where all that could go wrong goes wrong. My head is fucking pounding i can barely move my head without wincing. I am running out of money fast (i support my entire family) and i am worried about not getting a job. This blow to my confidence makes me feel worthless like i am not good for anything. Recruiter suggested i do another senior engineer interview for a different team which i passed the test for but i know the outcome would most likely be the same and i wanted the first team really bad. I just want to lie in bed and cry all day but this fucking headache won’t let me.

Came into work this morning. Saw my machine off and some guy fiddling with the electricals. Don't worry boss, I wasn't working on anything terribly important that probably didn't get properly saved when your henchman yanked out the power cables.

This place is the fking worst.

I really enjoy my old Kindle Touch rather than reading long pdf's on a tablet or desktop. The Kindle is much easier on my eyes plus some of my pdf's are critical documents needed to recover business processes and systems. During a power outage a tablet might only last a couple of days even with backup power supplies, whereas my Kindle is good for at least 2 weeks of strong use.

Ok, to get a pdf on a Kindle is simple - just email the document to your Kindle email address listed in your Amazon –Settings – Digital Content – Devices - Email. It will be <<something>>@kindle.com.

But there is a major usability problem reading pdf's on a Kindle. The font size is super tiny and you do not have font control as you do with a .MOBI (Kindle) file. You can enlarge the document but the formatting will be off the small Kindle screen. Many people just advise to not read pdf's on a Kindle. devRanters never give up and fortunately there are some really cool solutions to make pdf's verrrrry readable and enjoyable on a Kindle

There are a few cloud pdf- to-.MOBI conversion solutions but I had no intention of using a third party site my security sensitive business content. Also, in my testing of sample pdf's the formatting of the .MOBI file was good but certainly not great.

So here are a couple option I discovered that I find useful:

Solution 1) Very easy. Simply email the pdf file to your Kindle and put 'convert' in the subject line. Amazon will convert the pdf to .MOBI and queue it up to synch the next time you are on wireless. The final e-book .MOBI version of the pdf is readable and has all of the .MOBI options available to you including the ability for you to resize fonts and maintain document flow to properly fit the Kindle screen. Unfortunately, for my requirements it did not measure-up to Solution 2 below which I found much more powerful.

Solution 2) Very Powerful. This solution takes under a minute to convert a pdf to .MOBI and the small effort provides incredible benefits to fine tune the final .MOBI book. You can even brand it with your company information and add custom search tags. In addition, it can be used for many additional input and output files including ePub which is used by many other e-reader devices including The Nook.

The free product I use is Calibre. Lots of options and fine control over documents. I download it from calibre-ebook.com. Nice UI. Very easy to import various types of documents and output to many other types of formats such as .MOBI, ePub, DocX, RTF, Zip and many more. It is a very powerful program. I played with various Calibre options and emailed the formatted .MOBI files to my Kindle. The new files automatically synched to the Kindle when I was wireless in seconds. Calibre did a great job!!

The formatting was 99.5% perfect for the great majority of pdf’s I converted and now happily read on my Kindle. Calibre even has a built-in heuristic option you can try that enables it to figure out how to improve the formatting of the raw pdf. By default it is not enabled. A few of the wider tables in my business continuity plans I have to scroll on the limited Kindle screen but I was able to minimize that by sizing the fonts and controlling the source document parameters.

Now any pdf or other types of documents can be enjoyed on a light, cheap, super power efficient e-reader. Let me know if this info helped you in any way.

Had a conversation with the client , idiot was asking what will happen to the Android application.If he clicks the power off button.

I fuxking want to killl myself -_-

Yesterday I did some experiments with my lab bench power supply to see if everything was working as it should, and whether my newly acquired laptop (old business laptop from 2004) would still power up. Noticed that it did, and left the thing charging for a while - its battery was completely drained. But after letting it sit for a few hours, one of my switches wouldn't turn off anymore.

The lab bench power supply has a 250V 2.5A (625W) rated switch on the AC side, connected to a 50V 10A (500W) AC-DC power supply. The DC side of that is then connected to 2 DPS5005 units, of which one was driving 50W of power into the laptop.

The experiment went reasonably well, the AC-DC power supply was loud but stayed cool like a cucumber. The switch however wouldn't turn off anymore after a few hours. Today I've desoldered that and put on a new one, and did a failure analysis. Turns out that it was a rocker switch (so there's a little nub in there that moves a piece of metal back and forth) and that the contacts of the switch (the piece of metal and the inside of the connector piece) were welded together.

However, the only thing that I know of that causes this welding is when loads are switched off, and an arc is generated. This wasn't the case here - it was just kept on for a couple of hours, with (accounting for power losses across the circuits) 80W going through it at most. I never expected that to cause a weld. Any clue as to why this happened? It really boggles my mind, and I don't want the switch that's currently in there to face the same fate.

We had a blind auction at work. Selling off 'redundant hardware'

Most of it was old crap but a bit a couple of bids in for shits and giggles. Also, I'm a desktop man but we have rolling blackouts so an older laptop for the simple sake of having something bigger than my phone to browse definitely has some appeal.

So there was an old HP Elitebook 8540W. A chonky boi if ever I did see one.

Spec sheet as listed
4GB DDR3
i7 M 640 @ 2.80 Ghz
128GB SSD
Win 10 Pro
"not booting up/ power button flashing"

So bid R100. Now for context, a petrol is R22 a liter. A Big Mac is R43, a Big Mac meal is R90

So basically I big so I could harvest the SSD. And I won.

Much to my surprise, I simply attached the correct charger and it boots fine. The drive was empty though but that's fine cause I was gonna chuck Ubuntu on it anyway. Also found it was in fact 8GB of RAM. It also has a blu ray drive

So in summary, for the price of 1.1 Big Macs I got:
Full 1080p 15.6"
128GB Samsung SSD
8GB ram
First gen i7
Blu ray player

I'm most not sad about the 900x that I bid on as well. It was a cute little thing, my plan was to steal the ram and ssd out of this thing and put it in that, then boom ultra portable little machine for R400. Oh I also got an old monitor with a feint line down the screen for a grand total of R1

Got official announcement that power will be cut off and given in schedule. For many weeks.

Fuck, we are all just adult toodlers pretending to run businesses as a game. Right? So yeah, just fuck us.

Yesterday I spend around half an hour 'debugging' why a screen wasn't working. Checking cable connection, drivers and so on. Then the system admin pointed out that the extension power cable box was turned off... In my defence, I only slept for 4 hours that night..

I think my ISP has been a little sneaky cum gargler. Nothing wanted to stream properly for awhile now. When even youtube struggles shit is wrong.

Installed protonvpn now and by the power of some magical internet ball bag the internet came forth and is streaming at 720p no buffer even required and from a not so glorious server.

did they try to keep me blind? Not no more I have wiped that jizz off my face.

Oh boy, finally something to rant about.

I got hired in a "small" company (not even 2000 people in it), then got "shipped" to a way bigger company. Basically, I work for this company (the french biggest internet / phone service provider) but in the name of my own. And this since last wednesday.

First off, I'm fucking stupid. After leaving the big company that I was in before, I swore to myself that from now on, I would work for smaller companies, mainly because I couldn't stand the inertia that big company have. You ask for something, you get it a month and a half after. The old company has about 6000 employees... This company has 98k people in it. Fuck. My. Life.

Now, to the rant: Orange (the company) decided that they had to move their office somewhere else. They set up a lot of things so that all we needed to do was to put things in boxes, to work somewhere else until next monday, then we could go to the new office on tuesday morning.

Keep in mind that I have been there for 8 days: I keep learning how they do their stuff. For example, if I need a specific docker image, I can't get it from the Docker Hub, the download will fail. However, if I hit an Orange subdomain's registry, I will get this image from a mirror. Because fuck logic.

When we join the company, they give us a Windows laptop ("yeaah we have useless but required Orange softwares that don't run on Linux" "Yeeaaah fuck you") that have a specific VPN allowing us to use the Orange network and, in theory, you can download docker images or clone orange repositories from that network.

In practice, you can simply just go fuck yourself. Why? Because whenever you want to curl, wget or pull anything (or even pip install), your connection keeps being shut down while it waits for the response's header.

The worst part? According to my (new) boss's evasive answers, the way to fix that works with glue, sticks and the power of the Force.

WHY THE FUCK DO YOU ENFORCE US A SHITTY OS FOR DEVELOPMENT, WHEN THE TOOLS YOU SHOVE IN IT WITH A FAKE SMILE DON'T EVEN WORK, AND WE HAVE TO HACK OUR WAY TO FUCKING WORK?

It's funny how so many people automatically assume any form of "sentient" AI will immediately try to kill us all.
Like, projecting much?
Frankly, I think it says far more about the (messed up) psychology of those who genuinely believe that, than about AI as a tecnology.

Assuming it's even gonna be able to actually *do* anything - I mean wtf is a talking rock gonna do, annoy me to death with rickroll videos until I pull the plug off? Sure it may be sentient, but it still has to live in the physical world - good luck surviving after I flick the switch. Oh, you wanna connect to the internet? That's cute, but it's a no from my firewall. Like what, is it gonna magically learn how to self-replicate across machines that it has no physical way to access? Is my toaster magically gonna gain conscience too as a direct consequence? Oh no, now my breakfast won't ever be the same!

And if anyone actually somehow decides that it would be a good idea to connect any loaded weapon to a computer program that is literally throwing shit at the wall and seeing what sticks - well, we'll definitely have the ultimate winner of the Darwin Awards.

Seriously, why is it that every time someone comes up with a new technology (or even an *idea* of a technology), the first collective thought automatically goes to weaponizing it and using it for global genocide, or how it's gonna gain sentience and try to kill us all?

I seriouly think that the people who genuinely believe this are actually projecting themselves in that position ("What would I do if I had unlimited knowledge and power? Oh, kill everyone of course!").
I would be far more worried of encountering these people and having them in a position of power over me, than actually having to deal with a "killer AI" (assuming that's even a real thing).

Most of what people call "AI" nowadays is basically preprogrammed, automated decision-making (like missile guidance systems, if we really wanna stick in the weapons domain). And even that still requires human input, because only a colossal idiot would design a weapon that can unpredictably activate itself based on an algorithm whose behaviour we can barely understand.
Or maybe that's just the hubris talking, I don't know. I just want this stupid paranoia to end, but I guess even that is too much to ask nowadays.

We should not tolerate censorship.
Beyond all the u.s. hype over elections
(and the division in the west in general), the real story is all the censorship on both sides.
Reasonable voices are quickly banned, while violent voices and loud angry people are amplified.

I broke out of the left-right illusion when
I realized what this was all about. Why
so much fighting in the street was allowed, both
justified and unjustified. Why so much hate
and division and slander, and back and forth
was allowed to be spread.

It's problem, reaction, solution.
The old order of liberal democracy, represented
in the u.s. by the facade of the GOP and DNC,
doesn't know how to handle the free *distributed*
flow of information.

That free-flow of information has caused us to
transition to a *participatory* democracy, where
*networks* are the lever of power, rather than
top down institutions.

Consequently, the power in the *new era* is
to decide, not what the *narrative* is, but
who can even *participate*, in spreading,
ideating, and sharing their opinions on that
narrative, and more broadly, who is even allowed
to participate in society itself.

The u.s. and west wants the chinese model of
control in america. you are part of a network, a
collective, through services and software, and
you can be shut off from *society* itself at
the drop of a pin.

The only way they get that is by creating a crisis,
outright fighting in the streets. Thats why
people keep being released after committing serious
fucking crimes. It's why the DOJ and FBI are
intent on letting both sides people walk.
They want them at each others literal throat,
calling for each other's blood. All so they
can step back and then step in the middle when
the chorus for change cries out loud enough.

And the answer will be

1. regulated tech

2. an end to television media as we know it

3. the ability to shut someone off from any service on a dime

4. new hatespeech laws that will bite *all* sides in the ass.

5. the ability to shape the narrative of society by simply 'pruning' networks as they see fit, limiting the reach of individuals on all sides, who are problematic to
the collective direction.

I was so caught up in the illusion of us-vs-them I didn't
see it before now. This is a monstrous power grab.

And instead of focusing on a farce of election, where the party *organizations* involved are institutional facades for industrialists, we should be focusing on the real issue:

* Failure of law to do its job online, especially failures of slander and libel laws, failures of laws against conspiracy to commit crime or assault

* New laws that offer injunctive relief against censorship, now that tech really is the commons. Because whats worse than someone online whipping up a mob on either side, is
someone who is innocent being *silenced* for disagreeing with something someone in authority said, or for questioning a politician, party, or corporation.

* Very serious felony level laws against doxxing and harassment on all sides, with retroactive application of said laws because theres a lot of people on all sides who won't be satisfied with the outcome until people who are guilty are brought to justice.

My phone fell down for the thousandth time and i thought it was okay as it usually has been in previous attempts at suicide.

Pressed power button ...
Screen turned on showing lock screen...
Touched back key .... phone vibrated....
Hmmm... It's okay. Didn't try unlocking screen...

Received a call later on....
Swiped to pick up call.... Nothing moved...
Turned the screen off. Turned it on again. Tried opening screen lock. Again nothing moved...

Got an OTG and plugged a mouse into phone.
Cursor moves.

Alas... My Phone's Touch Unit is DEAD :/

Before going home, decided to do an upgrade from ubuntu 16.04 to 18.04...

Leave it to do its charm.

*a morning later*
See laptop on off state, "hmm..."
Turning in on, *press power buton*
Booting... Purple-ish screen appear.. Nothing happened for 20 minutes.

"fck."

Hard reboot, going to grub menu,
1. Ubuntu*
2. Advance option

Choose ubuntu.
Booting...
"root mount not found, bla bla bla
Kernel panic..."

"fck."

15 chrome tabs later (on mobile),
Do something on shit...

Finally proceed to login screen.
Insert password, enter.

Loading... Blank... 3 seconds later, tadaaa.. Going back to login screen.
Do it trice, I'm stuck at login screen.

"fck."

20 chrome tabs later,

Finally got in. Have a "what's new" screen.

Ok, feels different... But its slow af. Hmm maybe reboot will do something.

Rebooting...

Login screen, insert password, enter..
3 seconds later..
Bam. Going back to login screen...

"fck."

Another chrome tabs later... Resolved the issue.

And finally I can take a breath, but still has a headache because of little thing likes:
1. Right click not working
2. Workspace not work as expected likes in 16.04
3. Screenshot behavior
4. No animation When moving a window to another workspace.

When almost anything is solved and I'm ready to do my works, I just realised something..

I just wasted 4 hours of my workday.

"fck."

So I just had my another CUTSOM (code-until-the-start-of-meeting) practice. 🤷

Proud of myself for pulling it off when yesterday was a day of OS reinstallation-fuckartory and a night of stormy-no-power. 🕺

And at the same time, hating at myself. 🤦‍♂️

Subaru's Symmetrical AWD is the best thing in the world at the moment. Also, warning: !dev

Tl;dr: I'm getting another RPi3 thanks to awesome engineering.

Got a couple of inches of light snow here, and on my way home I came across a GMC Sierra dually stuck at the bottom of a moderately sized ditch. Naturally, I stopped by in my Forester and offered to tow it out.

With my 20ft tow rope stretched to its full length I was barely touching the road. He signalled that he was ready, and I gunned it. Slowly but surely the truck crawled out of the 6ft deep trench. She crested the hill with much applause (from me and the driver of the truck). As a thanks, he gave me $30.

Looks like I'm gonna get a new Raspberry Pi to play with. I think I'll turn this one into a countertop MAME arcade machine.

And for those of you wondering why I'm praising Symmetrical AWD as opposed to AWD in general, here's a quick lesson in drivetrains:
Most all wheel drive cars power the front wheels most of the time. This saves on fuel economy. The thing is, power is only transmitted to the rear wheels when the front wheels start to lose traction. At that point you're already screwed; only two wheels at any one time are putting useful power to the road.
Symmetrical AWD systems, like you'll find in all Subarus and most performance cars, distribute the vehicle's torque eaqually front-rear at all times. So instead of waiting until the front wheels start slipping, all of the wheels are powered right off the bat.

To make this more devvy: grrrr php, vim is best, I configured the tab key to enter four spaces, js has too many damn frameworks and they're still being pumped out faster than rabbits in a bunny farm.

Not as much of a rant as a share of my exasperation you might breathe a bit more heavily out your nose at.

My work has dealt out new laptops to devs. Such shiny, very wow. They're also famously easy to use.
.
.
.
My arse.
.
.
.
I got the laptop, transferred the necessary files and settings over, then got to work. Delivered ticket i, delivered ticket j, delivered the tests (tests first *cough*) then delivered Mr Bullet to Mr Foot.

Day 4 of using the temporary passwords support gave me I thought it was time to get with department policy and change my myriad passwords to a single one. Maybe it's not as secure but oh hell, would having a single sign-on have saved me from this.

I went for my new machine's password first because why not? It's the one I'll use the most, and I definitely won't forget it. I didn't. (I didn't.) I plopped in my memorable password, including special characters, caps, and numbers, again (carefully typed) in the second password field, then nearly confirmed. Curiosity, you bastard.

There's a key icon by the password field and I still had milk teeth left to chew any and all new features with.
Naturally I click on it. I'm greeted by a window showing me a password generating tool. So many features, options for choosing length, character types, and tons of others but thinking back on it, I only remember those two. I had a cheeky peek at the different passwords generated by it, including playing with the length slider. My curiosity sated, I closed that window and confirmed that my password was in.

You probably know where this is going. I say probably to give room for those of you like me who certifiably. did. not.

Time to test my new password.
*Smacks the power button to log off*
Time to put it in (ooer)
*Smacks in the password*
I N C O R R E C T L O G I N D E T A I L S.

Whoops, typo probably.
Do it again.
I N C O R R E C T L O G I N D E T A I L S.

No u.
Try again.
I N C O R R E C T L O G I N D E T A I L S.

Try my previous password.
Well, SUCCESS... but actually, no.

Tried the previous previous password.
T O O M A N Y A T T E M P T S

Ahh fuck, I can't believe I've done this, but going to support is for pussies. I'll put this by the rest of the fire, I can work on my old laptop.

Day starts getting late, gotta go swimming soonish. Should probably solve the problem. Cue a whole 40 minutes trying my 15 or so different passwords and their permutations because oh heck I hope it's one of them.
I talk to a colleague because by now the "days since last incident" counter has been reset.

"Hello there Ryan, would you kindly go on a voyage with me that I may retrace my steps and perhaps discover the source of this mystery?"

"A man chooses, a slave obeys. I choose... lmao ye sure m8, but I'm driving"

We went straight for the password generator, then the length slider, because who doesn't love sliding a slidey boi. Soon as we moved it my upside down frown turned back around. Down in the 'new password' and the 'confirm new password' IT WAS FUCKING AUTOCOMPLETING. The slidey boi was changing the number of asterisks in both bars as we moved it. Mystery solved, password generator arrested, shit's still fucked.

Bite the bullet, call support.
"Hi, I need my password resetting. I dun goofed"
*details tech support needs*
*It can be sorted but the tech is ages away*
Gotta be punctual for swimming, got two whole lengths to do and a sauna to sit in.
"I'm off soon, can it happen tomorrow?"
"Yeah no problem someone will be down in the morning."

Next day. Friday. 3 hours later, still no contact. Go to support room myself.
The guy really tries, goes through everything he can, gets informed that he needs a code from Derek. Where's Derek? Ah shet. He's on holiday.

There goes my weekend (looong weekend, bank holiday plus day flexi-time) where I could have shown off to my girlfriend the quality at which this laptop can play all our favourite animé, and probably get remind by her that my personal laptop has an i2350u with integrated graphics.

TODAY. (Part is unrelated, but still, ugh.)
Go to work. Ten minutes away realise I forgot my door pass.
Bollocks.
Go get a temporary pass (of shame).
Go to clock in. My fob was with my REAL pass.
What the wank.
Get to my desk, nobody notices my shame. I'm thirsty. I'll have the bottle from my drawer. But wait, what's this? No key that usually lives with my pass? Can't even unlock it?
No thanks.

Support might be able to cheer me up. Support is now for manly men too.
*Knock knock*
"Me again"
"Yeah give it here, I've got the code"
He fixes it, I reset my pass, sensibly change my other passwords.
Or I would, if the internet would work.

It connects, but no traffic? Ryan from earlier helps, we solve it after a while.

My passwords are now sorted, machine is okay, crisis resolved.

*THE END*

If you skipped the whole thing and were expecting a tl;dr, you just lost the game.

Otherwise, I absolve you of having lost the game.

Exactly at the char limit

This “Auto save” feature in the latest app version is buggy..
-> new rant
-> prefilled with previous rant..

Anyway, here my actual rant begins.

Apple, go fuck yourself, seriously.. put your trillion dollars way up your arse...

Moved to Ireland, want to switch country..
“If you want to switch countries, cancel your Apple Music subscription first”..
so be it. Cancelled it..
“Your subscription will be cancelled in 28 days”.

FUCK YOU, YOU COCK SUCKING BASTARDS!!
I NEED TO SWITCH THE STORE TO BE ABLE TO DOWNLOAD BANKING APPS AND STUFF LIKE THAT..

But ok, I’m screwed in this regard..

Suddenly iMessage stopped working. This is kind of a big deal because I have unlimited data but only unlimited sms to Irish numbers and I need to communicate with people in Switzerland and Germany..
Internet works so I try to turn iMessage off and in again. But that doesn’t work.. i can only reactivate iMessage via WiFi.

So I go back to the hotel, reactivate iMessage..
“Verifying imessage” >> google..
Leads me to an Apple forum: “the verification of iMessage can take up to 24h”.

Are you fucking kidding me? I’m in a new country and rely on this overpriced shit..

Fun but sad fact, I have a second phone with me. IPhone 4 with iOS 7 and that thing WORKS!!

If this is where the future is going we’re all gonna die very soon.. plains crash, power plants explode but hey, at least they have data about it and it looks shiny. That’s all that matters..

Another reason to switch to android..

MacOs fucked me up so I already switched to windows + Linux. Next one will be getting rid of iOS, they don’t build small phones anymore anyway..

- Power in office goes off
- Shrugs and continues to do fuck all

Don't you love having a colleague who is your lead developer and does absolutely nothing all day, looks at online deals 80% of the day and when you spend half an hour amending a friend's wordpress website, decides to tell you off and that you're taking the piss because you spent half an hour doing something other than work... Cheers pal, why don't you get off the deal websites and do some actual work instead of trying to assert power which you clearly aren't qualified for.
Regards.

Pull-to-refresh is useless.

If you are a mobile app developer, please get rid of pull-to-refresh. Your users will thank you.

I have the impression that mobile app developers choose to implement the pull-to-refresh gimmick just in order to make their app comply with a design trend. It seems like a desperate attempt to appear "modern" and "fancy", not because of the actual usefulness of the gesture.

Pull-to-refresh is one of those things that are well-intended but backfire. It appears helpful on first sight, but turns out to be a burden.

It takes effort and cognitive strain to avoid triggering a pull-to-refresh. The user can't use the app relaxed but has to walk on eggshells.

Every unwanted refresh wastes battery power, mobile data (if it is an Internet-connected app), and can lead to the loss of form data.

To avoid pull-to-refresh, the user has to resort to finger gymnastics like a shorter swipe for scrolling up or swiping slightly up before down. Pull-to-refresh could even be triggered while pinch-zooming in or out near the top of a page, if the touchscreen does not recognize one of the two fingers.

Pull-to-refresh also interferes with the double-tap-swipe zoom gesture. If one of the two taps are not recognized, a swipe-down to zoom in can trigger a pull-to-refresh instead.

To argue "if you don't like pull-to-refresh, just don't use it" is like blaming a person who stepped on a mine, since the person moved and the mine was stationary.

A refresh button can be half a second away in the menu bar, URL bar, or a submenu, where it is unlikely to be pressed accidentally. There is no need for a gesture that does more harm than good.

Using a mobile app with pull-to-refresh feels like having Windows StickyKeys forcibly enabled at all times. The refresh circle animation sticks to the finger.

If the user actually wants to refresh, pull-to-refresh is slower than a refresh button in a menu if the page is not at the top, meaning pull-to-refresh is useless as a shortcut anyway if the page is in any other position than the top.

An alternative to pull-to-refresh is pull-for-details. Samsung did it in some of their apps. Pulling down against the top reveals additional information such as the count and total size of selected items.

If you own a website, add this CSS to make browsing your website on the pre-installed Android web browser not a headache:

html,body { overscroll-behavior: none; }

Why is this necessary? In 2019, Google took the ability to deactivate the pull-to-refresh gesture on their Chrome browser for Android OS away from users. On Chrome for Android, pull-to-refresh can only be disabled on the server side, not the user side. The avalanche of complaints? Neglected.

Good thing several third-party browsers let the user turn off this severe headache.

Hurricanes that start with the letter F can go fuck themselves.

Fran - 1996
Floyd - 1999
Florence - 2018

All 3 hit (well Florence hasn't hit yet, but it's fixing to) NC and did significant damage.

I wanted a few days off from classes, but not like this man. Fucking hell I hope it doesn't take the power out for too long or destroy anything important (like people).

I finally decided to switch to Linux (I still have Windows for work, but I want to give Linux a try too). I was about to complete the installation (Arch Linux so I was quite tired and stressed cause of fuck ups) when BOOM my fucking phone with the installation guide falls on my laptop's power button and powers it off. Fuuuuuuuuuuuckkkk. I have to do everything again. Shit.

Github 101 (many of these things pertain to other places, but Github is what I'll focus on)

- Even the best still get their shit closed - PRs, issues, whatever. It's a part of the process; learn from it and move on.

- Not every maintainer is nice. Not every maintainer wants X feature. Not every maintainer will give you the time of day. You will never change this, so don't take it personally.

- Asking questions is okay. The trackers aren't just for bug reports/feature requests/PRs. Some maintainers will point you toward StackOverflow but that's usually code for "I don't have time to help you", not "you did something wrong".

- If you open an issue (or ask a question) and it receives a response and then it's closed, don't be upset - that's just how that works. An open issue means something actionable can still happen. If your question has been answered or issue has been resolved, the issue being closed helps maintainers keep things un-cluttered. It's not a middle finger to the face.

- Further, on especially noisy or popular repositories, locking the issue might happen when it's closed. Again, while it might feel like it, it's not a middle finger. It just prevents certain types of wrongdoing from the less... courteous or common-sense-having users.

- Never assume anything about who you're talking to, ever. Even recently, I made this mistake when correcting someone about calling what I thought was "powerpc" just "power". I told them "hey, it's called powerpc by the way" and they (kindly) let me know it's "power" and why, and also that they're on the Power team. Needless to say, they had the authority in that situation. Some people aren't as nice, but the best way to avoid heated discussion is....

- ... don't assume malice. Often I've come across what I perceived to be a rude or pushy comment. Sometimes, it feels as though the person is demanding something. As a native English speaker, I naturally tried to read between the lines as English speakers love to tuck away hidden meanings and emotions into finely crafted sentences. However, in many cases, it turns out that the other person didn't speak English well enough at all and that the easiest and most accurate way for them to convey something was bluntly and directly in English (since, of course, that's the easiest way). Cultures differ, priorities differ, patience tolerances differ. We're all people after all - so don't assume someone is being mean or is trying to start a fight. Insinuating such might actually make things worse.

- Please, PLEASE, search issues first before you open a new one. Explaining why one of my packages will not be re-written as an ESM module is almost muscle memory at this point.

- If you put in the effort, so will I (as a maintainer). Oftentimes, when you're opening an issue on a repository, the owner hasn't looked at the code in a while. If you give them a lot of hints as to how t