Join devRant
Do all the things like
++ or -- rants, post your own rants, comment on others' rants and build your customized dev avatar
Sign Up
Pipeless API
From the creators of devRant, Pipeless lets you power real-time personalized recommendations and activity feeds using a simple API
Learn More
-
Oh, man, I just realized I haven't ranted one of my best stories on here!
So, here goes!
A few years back the company I work for was contacted by an older client regarding a new project.
The guy was now pitching to build the website for the Parliament of another country (not gonna name it, NDAs and stuff), and was planning on outsourcing the development, as he had no team and he was only aiming on taking care of the client service/project management side of the project.
Out of principle (and also to preserve our mental integrity), we have purposely avoided working with government bodies of any kind, in any country, but he was a friend of our CEO and pleaded until we singed on board.
Now, the project itself was way bigger than we expected, as the wanted more of an internal CRM, centralized document archive, event management, internal planning, multiple interfaced, role based access restricted monster of an administration interface, complete with regular user website, also packed with all kind of features, dashboards and so on.
Long story short, a lot bigger than what we were expecting based on the initial brief.
The development period was hell. New features were coming in on a weekly basis. Already implemented functionality was constantly being changed or redefined. No requests we ever made about clarifications and/or materials or information were ever answered on time.
They also somehow bullied the guy that brought us the project into also including the data migration from the old website into the new one we were building and we somehow ended up having to extract meaningful, formatted, sanitized content parsing static HTML files and connecting them to download-able files (almost every page in the old website had files available to download) we needed to also include in a sane way.
Now, don't think the files were simple URL paths we can trace to a folder/file path, oh no!!! The links were some form of hash combination that had to be exploded and tested against some king of database relationship tables that only had hashed indexes relating to other tables, that also only had hashed indexes relating to some other tables that kept a database of the website pages HTML file naming. So what we had to do is identify the files based on a combination of hashed indexes and re-hashed HTML file names that in the end would give us a filename for a real file that we had to then search for inside a list of over 20 folders not related to one another.
So we did this. Created a script that processed the hell out of over 10000 HTML files, database entries and files and re-indexed and re-named all this shit into a meaningful database of sane data and well organized files.
So, with this we were nearing the finish line for the project, which by now exceeded the estimated time by over to times.
We test everything, retest it all again for good measure, pack everything up for deployment, simulate on a staging environment, give the final client access to the staging version, get them to accept that all requirements are met, finish writing the documentation for the codebase, write detailed deployment procedure, include some automation and testing tools also for good measure, recommend production setup, hardware specs, software versions, server side optimization like caching, load balancing and all that we could think would ever be useful, all with more documentation and instructions.
As the project was built on PHP/MySQL (as requested), we recommended a Linux environment for production. Oh, I forgot to tell you that over the development period they kept asking us to also include steps for Windows procedures along with our regular documentation. Was a bit strange, but we added it in there just so we can finish and close the damn project.
So, we send them all the above and go get drunk as fuck in celebration of getting rid of them once and for all...
Next day: hung over, I get to the office, open my laptop and see on new email. I only had the one new mail, so I open it to see what it's about.
Lo and behold! The fuckers over in the other country that called themselves "IT guys", and were the ones making all the changes and additions to our requirements, were not capable enough to follow step by step instructions in order to deploy the project on their servers!!!
[Continues in the comments]26 -
UPDATE: I have my dream job.
About a year ago I commented on Devrant that I was having some hard luck interviewing for development jobs.
Shortly after my post I decided to lower my expectations and took a job at a tech support call center.(3 month contract)
After getting a little experience(Not just a degree) I was able to land a hardware support job at a fortune 500 company.(Not what a programmer really wants 😂)
I worked hard and started writing tools at home to help with the job. I started giving them out to the other techs and put them on a little internal website for easy access.
About 3 months ago I just became a software engineer within the company.(after 6 months of hardware repair.) The main reason I got the job was because I showed them how much overtime and extra work I had done and that the techs relied on my software to do there jobs and that I was dependable.
It was hard work but it was worth it. And I built software that I never would have done if I hadn't taken this "lower job"
So keep your chin up and your fingers on the keys, I was in your shoes a year ago. 😉12 -
https://git.kernel.org/…/ke…/... sure some of you are working on the patches already, if you are then lets connect cause, I am an ardent researcher for the same as of now.
So here it goes:
As soon as kernel page table isolation(KPTI) bug will be out of embargo, Whatsapp and FB will be flooded with over-night kernel "shikhuritee" experts who will share shitty advices non-stop.
1. The bug under embargo is a side channel attack, which exploits the fact that Intel chips come with speculative execution without proper isolation between user pages and kernel pages. Therefore, with careful scheduling and timing attack will reveal some information from kernel pages, while the code is running in user mode.
In easy terms, if you have a VPS, another person with VPS on same physical server may read memory being used by your VPS, which will result in unwanted data leakage. To make the matter worse, a malicious JS from innocent looking webpage might be (might be, because JS does not provide language constructs for such fine grained control; atleast none that I know as of now) able to read kernel pages, and pawn you real hard, real bad.
2. The bug comes from too much reliance on Tomasulo's algorithm for out-of-order instruction scheduling. It is not yet clear whether the bug can be fixed with a microcode update (and if not, Intel has to fix this in silicon itself). As far as I can dig, there is nothing that hints that this bug is fixable in microcode, which makes the matter much worse. Also according to my understanding a microcode update will be too trivial to fix this kind of a hardware bug.
3. A software-only remedy is possible, and that is being implemented by all major OSs (including our lovely Linux) in kernel space. The patch forces Translation Lookaside Buffer to flush if a context switch happens during a syscall (this is what I understand as of now). The benchmarks are suggesting that slowdown will be somewhere between 5%(best case)-30%(worst case).
4. Regarding point 3, syscalls don't matter much. Only thing that matters is how many times syscalls are called. For example, if you are using read() or write() on 8MB buffers, you won't have too much slowdown; but if you are calling same syscalls once per byte, a heavy performance penalty is guaranteed. All processes are which are I/O heavy are going to suffer (hostings and databases are two common examples).
5. The patch can be disabled in Linux by passing argument to kernel during boot; however it is not advised for pretty much obvious reasons.
6. For gamers: this is not going to affect games (because those are not I/O heavy)
Meltdown: "Meltdown" targeted on desktop chips can read kernel memory from L1D cache, Intel is only affected with this variant. Works on only Intel.
Spectre: Spectre is a hardware vulnerability with implementations of branch prediction that affects modern microprocessors with speculative execution, by allowing malicious processes access to the contents of other programs mapped memory. Works on all chips including Intel/ARM/AMD.
For updates refer the kernel tree: https://git.kernel.org/…/ke…/...
For further details and more chit-chats refer: https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/...
~Cheers~
(Originally written by Adhokshaj Mishra, edited by me. )
23 -
1. I'm a programmer, that does not mean I know every possible programming language. Yes, I can build Android apps, standalone softwares, serverside frameworks. No, I do not know how to build frigging websites!
2. "You can build a website in 2 days, you're a programmer". Tell a single mechanic to build an entire car in 2 days or tell a civil engineer to build an entire building in 2 days and I'll build your website in 2 days.
AAAAAAARRRRRGGGGGHHHHH!
Why does your family think that being a programmer means being a magician who can just pull any kind of software, hardware, app, website out of their hat?17 -
Not my mom, but my wife's whole family. I'm a software developer.
So we're invited to her grandmother's 85th birthday celebration with pretty much every family member they could think to invite. 100+ people, and we all sit down in a circle in a huge room to watch a video that my wife's father and aunts/uncles put together.
They start the video and there's no sound. I'm a software developer, so I'm not an expert in hardware issues. I try to turn invisible, because every tech person knows what comes next, and this is in the center of a room of people I don't know.
After about 15 minutes of people struggling to get the audio working, one of the people remembers I "work with computer". Soon I have a dozen people calling me to the center of the room.
I begrudgingly make my way to the computer and projector. Upon inspection, I find that the computer is connected via VGA to the projector.
Me: "This cable only carries video. You need a different kind of cable, or you can hook up an AUX cable--the kind you use for headphones."
Other Guy: "I used this cable earlier and the audio was working."
Me: "...that's weird. Well, can we try plugging in an AUX cable?"
Yet Another Guy: "Will this help?" Holds up an HDMI cable
Me: "Oh, yeah! That should do it."
Other Guy: "I tried plugging that in, but it didn't change anything."
Me: "Hmmm..." Quickly unplug VGA and plug in HDMI, then click play.
The sound comes out in its full cheesy music glory. Everybody cheers, and I walk back to my seat. Throughout the rest of party, I'm approached by various other family members who ask me if I can fix X since I'm a "computer guy". Isn't it great to work in tech?12 -
Storytime!
This customer comes in and practically throws a computer on the counter.
Customer: This computer isn't working. I've ran the diagnostics and it says it's software. *places a dvd case with a 32 bit Windows 7 disk in it on the counter* It had Windows 10 on it, but I want Windows 7 on it.
Me: Well, you may have issues with the drivers if you put Windows 7 on it--
Customer: I don't care, I just want Windows 7.
Me: You SHOULD care. That means no wifi, no display, no mouse... Windows 7 doesn't like Windows 10 hardware.
Customer: Then... check to see Windows 7 compatibility!
Me: Alright.... *makes notes to check for Windows 7 compatibility*
Me: So has this Windows 7 been used before?
Customer: Yes, it has.
Me: On how many computers?
Customer: I've installed it on two computers and it works just fine.
Me: That's weird because Windows license keys are for one computer only. Are both of them connected to the internet?
Customer: Yes.
Me: Well, okay then... *finishes up ticket*
Customer: I work in this field and I just don't understand why they don't come with the disks anymore. How much is a Windows 10 disk?
Me: *gives price*
Customer: And do you have any?
Me: Let me check *I go to where they are, find some and come back out*
Me: Unfortunately we're out at the moment and would have to special order some back in.
Customer: OK. So then how much to fix this computer?
Me: *price of installing Windows and backing up data*
Customer: That's halfway to the price of a new one of these!
Me: Well yes, an HP at Walmart... But you do have that option if you want to take it.
Customer: Well, why does it cost that much?
Me: Well, it's $labor1 to install Windows, $labor2 to do some basic setup and drivers, and $labor3 to backup and restore data.
Customer: Oh, well I don't want data.
Me: Okay, well then it would be $total - $labor3
Customer: ...Okay, fine
Me: *updates the ticket*
When she finally left I put it on the bench and the first message said "SMART ERROR." I then did 4 different tests that said "lol, the hard drive is failing."
If you "worked in this field," you would know that a SMART error is hard drive related.
If you worked in this field, you would know that Windows is only a 1PC license, so why are you lying about installing it with no issues on other computers?
If you worked in this field, you would know you would want a 64bit Windows on your computer.
If you worked in this field, you would know how to find a Windows 10 installation media online.
If you worked in this field, you would know that HPs are not good computers to get.
IF YOU FUCKING WORKED IN THIS FIELD YOU WOULDN'T BE SUCH A FUCKING CUNT.17 -
Biggest scaling challenge I've faced?
Around 2006~2007 the business was in double-digit growth thanks to the eCommerce boom and we were struggling to keep up with the demand.
Upper IT management being more hardware focused and always threw more hardware at the problem. At its worst, we had over 25 web servers (back then, those physical tall-rectangle boxes..no rack system yet) and corresponding SQL server for each (replicated from our main sql server)
Then business boomed again and projected the need for 40 servers (20 web servers, 20 sql servers) over the next 5 years. Hardware+software costs (they were going to have to tear down a wall in order to expand the server room) were going to be in the $$ millions.
Even though we were making money, the folks spending it didn't seem to care, but I knew this trajectory was not sustainable, so I started utilizing (this was 2007) WCF services and Microsoft's caching framework Velocity. Started out small, product lookup data (description, price, the simple stuff) and within a month, I was able to demonstrate the web site could scale with less than half of our current hardware infrastructure.
After many political battles (I've ranted about a few of those), the $$ won and even with the current load, we were able to scale back to 5 web servers and 2 sql servers. When the business increased in the double-digits again, and again...we were still the same hardware for almost 5 years. We only had to add another service server when the international side of the business started taking off.
Challenge wasn't the scaling issue, the challenge was dealing with individuals who resisted change.3 -
Well, here's the OS rant I promised. Also apologies for no blog posts the past few weeks, working on one but I want to have all the information correct and time isn't my best friend right now :/
Anyways, let's talk about operating systems. They serve a purpose which is the goal which the user has.
So, as everyone says (or, loads of people), every system is good for a purpose and you can't call the mainstream systems shit because they all have their use.
Last part is true (that they all have their use) but defining a good system is up to an individual. So, a system which I'd be able to call good, had at least the following 'features':
- it gives the user freedom. If someone just wants to use it for emailing and webbrowsing, fair enough. If someone wants to produce music on it, fair enough. If someone wants to rebuild the entire system to suit their needs, fair enough. If someone wants to check the source code to see what's actually running on their hardware, fair enough. It should be up to the user to decide what they want to/can do and not up to the maker of that system.
- it tries it's best to keep the security/privacy of its users protected. Meaning, by default, no calling home, no integrating users within mass surveillance programs and no unnecessary data collection.
- Open. Especially in an age of mass surveillance, it's very important that one has the option to check the underlying code for vulnerabilities/backdoors. Can everyone do that, nope. But that doesn't mean that the option shouldn't be there because it's also about transparency so you don't HAVE to trust a software vendor on their blue eyes.
- stability. A system should be stable enough for home users to use. For people who like to tweak around? Also, but tweaking *can* lead to instability and crashes, that's not the systems' responsibility.
Especially the security and privacy AND open parts are why I wouldn't ever voluntarily (if my job would depend on it, sure, I kinda need money to stay alive so I'll take that) use windows or macos. Sure, apple seems to care about user privacy way more than other vendors but as long as nobody can verify that through source code, no offense, I won't believe a thing they say about that because no one can technically verify it anyways.
Some people have told me that Linux is hard to use for new/(highly) a-technical people but looking at my own family and friends who adapted fast as hell and don't want to go back to windows now (and mac, for that matter), I highly doubt that. Sure, they'll have to learn something new. But that was also the case when they started to use any other system for the first time. Possibly try a different distro if one doesn't fit?
Problems - sometimes hard to solve on Linux, no doubt about that. But, at least its open. Meaning that someone can dive in as deep as possible/necessary to solve the problem. That's something which is very difficult with closed systems.
The best example in this case for me (don't remember how I did it by the way) was when I mounted a network drive at boot on windows and Linux (two systems using the same webDav drive). I changed the authentication and both systems weren't in for booting anymore. Hours of searching how to unfuck this on windows - I ended up reinstalling it because I just couldn't find a solution.
On linux, i found some article quite quickly telling to remove the entry for the webdav thingy from fstab. Booted into a root recovery shell, chrooted to the harddrive, removed the entry in fstab and rebooted. BAM. Everything worked again.
So yeah, that's my view on this, I guess ;P31 -
A quite normal Windows day:
Bios to Windows: "Go now! Get up!"
Windows to Bios: "Always slow with the young circuit boards."
"I've got something weird on screen."
Windows' answer: "Ignore it first."
Hardware assistant to Windows: "The user puts pressure. He wants me to identify this thing. Could be an ISDN card."
Windows: "Well, well."
Unknown ISDN card to all: "Will you please let me in?"
Network card to intruder: "You can't spread out here!"
Windows: "Quiet in the case! Or I'll cut both their support!"
Device Manager: "Offer compromise. The network card is allowed on Mondays, the ISDN card is on Tuesday."
Graphics card to Windows: "My driver retired yesterday. I'm crashing now."
Windows to graphics card: "When will you be back?"
Graphics card: "Well, not at first."
CD-Rom drive to Windows: "uh, I would have a new driver here..."
Windows: "What's ich´n supposed to do with it?!"
Installation software to Windows: "Leave it, I'll mach´ that already."
Windows: "That's nice to hear."
USB connection to interrupt management: "Alarm! Just been penetrated by a scanner cable. Request response."
Interrupt management: "Where are you coming from?"
USB connection: "I was in the computer right from the start. I'm joined by another colleague."
"You're not on my list." - "Say something."
Windows: "Hopefully there won't be another printer."
Graphics card: "The new driver twitches."
Windows: "We'll just have to get the old one out of retirement."
Uninstall program to new driver: "Go away."
Unwanted driver: "Fuck you."
Windows to Norton Utilities: "Kill him and his brood!"
Utilities to driver rests: "Sorry, we have to delete you."
Important system file: "Arrrrrrgghh!"
Windows on blue screen: "Gib´, the Norton Boys are over the top again."
Blue screen to user: "So, that's it for this week."
Excuse me for stealing your time
And I know it's way too long7 -
So. A while ago I was on OkCupid, trying to find the Pierre to my Marie Curie (without the whole brain getting crushed under a horse carriage wheel obviously) and I decided the best way was to have my profile lead with my passion for technology. It turned out pretty unique, if I do say so myself.
At the end of it, I amassed some interesting and unique messages:
- A Java pickup line (that I never responded to. Yes I'm a very basic Devranter)
- A request to turn the man's software into hardware (to which I politely informed him that this was scientifically impossible unless a reader proves me wrong)
- Another impossible request to turn his floppy disk into a hard drive (how outdated too, why not HDD to SSD for faster speed amirite? That was awful don't mind me)
- A sincere request to help troubleshoot a laptop (Honestly I would've helped with help requests but this is a dating site...)
- A sincere request to help debug a student project followed with a link to a GitHub repo
- Another sincere request with studying for a computer exam
- And lastly, my favourite: a sincere job offer by a guy who went from flirtatious to desperate for a programmer in a minute. He was looking for *insert python, big data, buzzwords here* and asked me for a LinkedIn. I proceeded to inquire exactly what he wanted me to do. He then asks me to WRITE a Python tutorial and that he would pay a few cents per word written so he could publish it. Literally no programming involved.
Needless to say I went to look elsewhere.26 -
A group of Security researchers has officially fucked hardware-level Intel botnet officially branded as "Intel Management Engine" they did so by gathering it all the autism they were able to get from StackOverflow mods... though they officially call it a Buffer Overflow.
On Wednesday, in a presentation at Black Hat Europe, Positive Technologies security researchers Mark Ermolov and Maxim Goryachy plan to explain the firmware flaws they found in Intel Management Engine 11, along with a warning that vendor patches for the vulnerability may not be enough.
Two weeks ago, the pair received thanks from Intel for working with the company to disclose the bugs responsibility. At the time, Chipzilla published 10 vulnerability notices affecting its Management Engine (ME), Server Platform Services (SPS), and Trusted Execution Engine (TXE).
The Intel Management Engine, which resides in the Platform Controller Hub, is a coprocessor that powers the company's vPro administrative features across a variety of chip families. It has its own OS, MINIX 3, a Unix-like operating system that runs at a level below the kernel of the device's main operating system.
It's a computer designed to monitor your computer. In that position, it has access to most of the processes and data on the main CPU. For admins, it can be useful for managing fleets of PCs; it's equally appealing to hackers for what Positive Technologies has dubbed "God mode."
The flaws cited by Intel could let an attacker run arbitrary code on affected hardware that wouldn't be visible to the user or the main operating system. Fears of such an attack led Chipzilla to implement an off switch, to comply with the NSA-developed IT security program called HAP.
But having identified this switch earlier this year, Ermolov and Goryachy contend it fails to protect against the bugs identified in three of the ten disclosures: CVE-2017-5705, CVE-2017-5706, and CVE-2017-5707.
The duo say they found a locally exploitable stack buffer overflow that allows the execution of unsigned code on any device with Intel ME 11, even if the device is turned off or protected by security software.
For more of the complete story go here:
https://blackhat.com/eu-17/...
https://theregister.co.uk/2017/12/...
I post mostly daily news, commentaries and such on my site for anyone that wish to drop by there
19 -
I really, honestly, am getting annoyed when someone tells me that "Linux is user-friendly". Some people seem to think that because they themselves can install Linux, that anyone can, and because I still use Windows I'm some sort of a noob.
So let me tell you why I don't use Linux: because it never actually "just works". I have tried, at the very least two dozen times, to install one distro or another on a machine that I owned. Never, not even once, not even *close*, has it installed and worked without failing on some part of my hardware.
My last experience was with Ubuntu 17.04, supposed to have great hardware and software support. I have a popular Dell Alienware machine with extremely common hardware (please don't hate me, I had a great deal through work with an interest-free loan to buy it!), and I thought for just one moment that maybe Ubuntu had reached the point where it just, y'know, fucking worked when installing it... but no. Not a chance.
It started with my monitors. My secondary monitor that worked fine on Windows and never once failed to display anything, simply didn't work. It wasn't detected, it didn't turn on, it just failed. After hours of toiling with bash commands and fucking around in x conf files, I finally figured out that for some reason, it didn't like my two IDENTICAL monitors on IDENTICAL cables on the SAME video card. I fixed it by using a DVI to HDMI adapter....
Then was my sound card. It appeared to be detected and working, but it was playing at like 0.01% volume. The system volume was fine, the speaker volume was fine, everything appeared great except I literally had no fucking sound. I tried everything from using the front output to checking if it was going to my display through HDMI to "switching the audio sublayer from alsa to whatever the hell other thing exists" but nothing worked. I gave up.
My mouse? Hell. It's a Corsair Gaming mouse, nothing fancy, it only has a couple extra buttons - none of those worked, not even the goddamn scrollwheel. I didn't expect the *lights* to work, but the "back" and "Forward" buttons? COME ON. After an hour, I just gave up.
My media keyboard that's like 15 years old and is of IBM brand obviously wasn't recognized. Didn't even bother with that one.
Of my 3 different network adapters (2 connectors, one wifi), only one physical card was detected. Bluetooth didn't work. At this point I was so tired of finding things that didn't work that I tried something else.
My work VPN... holy shit have you ever tried configuring a corporate VPN on Linux? Goddamn. On windows it's "next next next finish then enter your username/password" and on Linux it's "get this specific format TLS certificate from your IT with a private key and put it in this network conf and then run this whatever command to...." yeah no.
And don't get me started on even attempting to play GAMES on this fucking OS. I mean, even installing the graphic drivers? Never in my life have I had to *exit the GUI layer of an OS* to install a graphic driver. That would be like dropping down to MS-DOS on Windows to install Nvidia drivers. Holy shit what the fuck guys. And don't get me started on WINE, I ain't touching this "not an emulator emulator" with a 10-foot pole.
And then, you start reading online for all these problems and it's a mix of "here are 9038245 steps to fix your problem in the terminal" and "fucking noob go back to Windows if you can't deal with it" posts.
It's SO FUCKING FRUSTRATING, I spent a whole day trying to get a BASIC system up and running, where it takes a half-hour AT MOST with any version of Windows. I'm just... done.
I will give Ubuntu one redeeming quality, however. On the Live USB, you can use the `dd` command to mirror a whole drive in a few minutes. And when you're doing fucking around with this piece of shit OS that refuses to do simple things like "playing audio", `dd` will restore Windows right back to where it was as if Ubuntu never existed in the first place.
Thanks, `dd`. I wish you were on Windows. Your OS is the LEAST user friendly thing I've ever had to deal with.31 -
How has coding impacted your life...?
- Using Linux
- Valuing OpenSorce over cracked software
- Using more CLI than GUI programs
- Only playing games that run on Linux or Wine
- Hating Micro$oft
- Utilizing VMs and Servers
- Tinkering with Hardware (RPi, custom PC)
- ...
... Nah not that much. 🤗😅13 -
Modern software has gotten so bad that it even gets sluggish at times on late 2018 flagship devices. Slow, cheap hardware like is usually developers' and fanboys' excuse, particularly when it comes to Windows stuff? Like hell it is.
Software "engineering" has become so.. terribly inefficient. I'd dare any developer worth their salt to rewrite their program to make it work on an early 2000's machine. After all, those can run pretty advanced GUI's, have a reasonable amount of hardware (just think about how large a gigabyte of RAM really is) yet should be able to make for a reasonable limitation set.
Hardware limitations are the mother of optimization. Not every person on the planet has a 32-core Xeon workstation with 64GB of DDR4 RAM and a GTX Titan in it. Whether your application performs reasonably well on your machine shouldn't be the metric. Try deploying it on that laptop you tucked into a shelf years ago and reevaluate.. please.
And definitely you Slack!! Slacking off, is that what inspired the name of that pile of junk?! 😡26 -
1. I wish that people start taking back their device ownership. Right to repair is an extremely important thing. Like that Nexus 6P that I've recently repaired by jamming another battery into it, now it's at 110-ish% health according to AccuBattery. And it cost me.. €10 or so? All the while if I wasn't able to get in there, it would've been a €120 paperweight (and that's not even considering the €300-ish (? Someone please fill me in on that) price it retailed at back in 2015 when it was a flagship).
(edit the so many'th: according to https://express.co.uk/life-style/... the base model was apparently £449 at release, haven't been able to verify it though.. point is, a paperweight at such prices would've been quite a bummer, I mean for me it was even one given that it failed a mere few months after purchase for €120.. €40/m for a phone ain't nothing :/)
Right to repair is an extremely important thing, and the ability to do so shouldn't ever be impeded. Users should become able again to service the devices that they own.
2. I wish that people start caring about their privacy again. Google and Facebook and the likes are large companies, but at the end of the day, that's all they are. Large companies. And they're hungry for your data, not because they're selling it, rather because they're collecting it to an extent which they shouldn't. Over at DDG (https://spreadprivacy.com/duckduckg...) they explain a very much viable alternative revenue model pretty well. Additionally, there's several tools which you can use to limit the amount of data that's being collected about you. These include but are not limited to Firefox, NoScript, ad blockers (I personally use uBlock), a trustworthy VPN (ideally one of your own), and Tor.
3. I wish that software would become less inefficient. It really pains me to see that applications with functionality that could be implemented in a couple of MB at most come at a size of several hundreds of MB. 1% efficiency, even the inefficient as fuck tungsten light bulbs weren't that awful!!! Imagine what could be done with all the hardware we have available nowadays, if every piece of software would be around 80% efficient as is a common norm in electronics. Just looking at Linux which is still in many ways convoluted, modern desktops with a couple hundred MB of RAM usage? You've got it! So why can't OS's like Windows (although I have to say, huge improvements have been made there over the last few years) and browsers like Firefox and Chrome be more like that? I really don't understand.
There's several more wishes I have of course, but those are the most important ones.. hopefully I'll be able to see at least one of them come true during my life.10 -
I've been away... for too long. But today I have an announcement.
I've finally resigned from the Navy.
Little backstory: I have been thinking to resign since my last year as an Ensign, and I finally gained enough skill (and confidence) to make a CV and send it to a few companies. And lo and behold, a company actually was interested.
To be stupidly honest, maybe other factors certainly have played a part, but hey, I actually got a position in the sector I am interested and somewhat good: networks, sysadmin and security.
The CO and XO at my ship were mostly like "meh, he will retract his resignation, why would he want to leave, he is not serious". Until a few days ago, when they realised that I do not operate that way. And now panic has spread among them. I have designed and deployed quite some systems on the ship, both hardware and software, and now... history repeats again. This had happened to EVERY ship I've served before, but now, it will be permanent. And, oh boy, their faces and behaviour when the facts finally sank in... to quote a big mind of YouTube, "Not enough popcorn on Earth".
So, no more new Navy tech stories, but at least I am gaining my sanity back. I've even halved my cigarette and coffee consumption. I'll try to keep in touch with DevRant, but things are quite chaotic now (for them, anyway). But, for now, all I can think of is...
12 -
It was only a while ago that I realized that “firm” was not quite “hard”, but also not “soft”, hence “firmware”, it's in between hardware and software.32
-
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
12 -
===rant
So I have been freelancing as web developer for 5 years. I was also playing basketball professionally so I was only working part-time, building websites here and there, small android apps to learn the job and I was also reading a lot to challenge my brain.
When I stopped playing basketball about a year ago, I thought I would really enjoy coding full time so I pursued a job.
With no formal education and just a basketball background on paper, in the collapsed Greek economy, as you may assume chances of landing a job are minimal.
After about 40 resumes sent I only got an internship. It was a 4 month, part-time, no pay deal, and then the company would decide if they would like to hire me later.
The company had 4 employees and they are one of the largest software distribution businesses in my area. They resell SaaS bought from a third company, bundled with installation support, initial configuration, hardware support, whatever a client may need.
I was the only one with any ability to code whatsoever. The other people were working mostly on customer support with the occasional hardware repair.
After the 4 month period they owner (small company, owner was also manager and other roles) told me that they are very happy with my work and would like to keep me part-time with minimum pay.
Just to give you and idea if the amounts of money involved, in Greece, after taxes, my salary was 240euros per month. And the average cost of surviving (rent, cheapest food possible, no expenses on anything but super basics) is about 600euros.
I told him I needed more to live and he told me ok, we will reevaluate a few months later, at the end of May 2017.
I just accepted it without having many options. The company after all was charging clients 30euros per hour for my projects so I kept thinking that if I worked a lot and delivered consistently I would get a full time job and decent money.
And I delivered. In the following months I made a Magento extension, some WordPress themes, a C# application to extract data from the client's ERP and import it to a third application, a click to call application to use Asterisk to originate calls from the client's ERP, a web application to manage a restaurant's menu and many more small projects. Whatever they asked, I delivered.
On time, version controlled, heavily documented solutions (my C# ones are not exactly masterpieces but it was my first time with the language and windows).
So when May ended I was pretty excited to hear they wanted to keep me full time. I worked hard for it, I was serious, professional, I tried a lot to learn things so I can deliver, and the company recognized that. YAY.
So the time comes to talk money. The offer was 480euros per month. Double my part-time pay, minimum wage. I asked for about 700. Manager said it's hard but I will see what I can do. So we agreed to keep the deal for June while they are working on a better offer.
During the first half of June I finished my last project, put all my work on a nice folder with a nice readme on every project's directory, with their version control and everything.
The offer never improved, so I said no deal, and as of today, I am jobless.
I am stressed as fuck and excited as fuck at the same time.
I will do my best to survive in the shitstorm that is called Greece.
Bring it on.9 -
Well, it all started off with hardware-level programming involving jumpers and stuff like that... Then came Assembly, which was good.. B, C compilers. Finally came the interpreted languages, and that's where in my opinion the abstraction should've ended. But no, we needed more frameworks, more libraries, even more abstraction! Where does it end? As it seems to be going, I guess that users will have kid toys - no iToys! - for electronics and we'll be programming on with bloated Scratch GUI's. Nothing against Scratch, but that shit ain't proper programming anymore. God I can't wait for the future.
ABSTRACT ALL THE THINGS!!!
Oh and not to mention that all software will be governed in political correctness by some Alex SJW AI shit that became sentient. Not a single programming term will be non-offensive anymore, no matter how hard you try to not offend anyone, or God forbid - don't care about it because you just want to make something that's readable, usable and working!! Terms, UI names for buttons, heck even icons! REMOVE IT BECAUSE IT OFFENDS SOMEONE THAT I DON'T EVEN KNOW JACK SHIT ABOUT!!!18 -
My start at one of the Big Four (accounting firms).
The first two days of each month they organise "onboarding days" for the new starters of that month. (I so hate upper management buzzwords!) They sent me a formal invitation that looked like I was being invited to a ball with the royals, and they included the following super-smarty-pants line: "Dress code: would you wear jeans and t-shirt when you meet a client?"
And I thought: "I'm an effing hardware and software engineer for internal services. I will never meet a client." But I dressed formally nonetheless, and I went to the onboarding, and I hated every second I spent in those effing high heels, and don't get me started on how I managed to get a run on my stockings in the first hour.
The first day of the onboarding we sat through eight hours of general talks from senior employees who wanted to explain the "culture" and "values" of our company, but the worst of all was the three-hour introduction to IT services where they "helped us set up our new laptops" and taught us how to send e-mails and how to use the Company Portal.
On the second day, they divided us into groups depending on our speciality (assurance, taxes, legal, etc) and exposed us to further 8 hours of boredom related to our speciality. However, since the "digital services" thing was still new to them, we didn't have a category of our own, and we had to attend the introduction to one of the other categories, and I didn't understand one word of what was being said.
On the third day I finally went to my office and they provided me with a second laptop. It turns out that we engineers got different laptops and were allowed to manage it ourselves instead of letting central IT manage it for us. So I simply returned the laptop they had given me the first day and started working. However, for some reason, the laptop I returned was not registered, and two weeks later they started pestering me with emails asking where was the laptop "I had stolen". It took me 3 weeks of emails and calls to make them understand that I had returned the laptop immediately.
Also, on the two onboarding days we had to sign attendance, and since I forgot to sign the paper list on the second day, they invited me to the event the next month again. I explained to them that I had already attended the onboarding and didn't go, so they invited me again on the third month, and they threatened me with "disciplinary action" if I didn't go. After a week of lost time writing emails and calling people, I ended up going to the onboarding again just to sign the effing list.
In the end, I resigned during the probation time. That company was the worst experience of my life. It was an example of corporate culture so absurdly exaggerated that it sometimes reminded me of Kafka's Trial. I think they have more "HR representatives" than people who do actual work.6 -
I hope computing heavens have:
-One brand of hardware
-One OS
-One browser
-No closed source software
-No ads
-One monitor aspect ratio
-One fucking programming language with a fucking big standard library.
-Phones are just the same exactly the same OS as in computer, not stupid adaptations.
-All pages are only HTML/CSS, without JS.
-Due there is one browser and one OS, when you need a dynamic page, you can display a desktop app in the browser downloading its binary.
-There are one fucking brand on printer with standard drivers which are included in the OS.
We are so far from heaven15 -
This happend to me around 2 weeks ago. For some reason, I decied to post this now.
I won the lottery, yey! I mean, bot really, but I am <19yo student, "less than junior dev" in my office, but sonce I am the only one who is capable of working with hardware, I was working month back as a sysadmin for a few days. Our last sysadmin was really good working but really, really toxic guy, so he got fired on a spot after argument with some manager or whatever, no big deal, we could have another guy hired in a week. But, our backup server literally was on fire, all data probably dead because bad capacitor or whatever. This was our only backup of everything at the time. Everyone in full fucking panic mode, we had literally no other working HW we could use for backup, but then comes me, intern employed on his first dev job for 3 months. That day I bought some HW for my own personal server at home (Intel NUC with some Celeron, 4GB DDR4 RAM and two 240GB SSDs for RAID 1. My manager asked everyone in the office for sollution how to survive next 4 days before new server arrives. People there had no idea what tk do and no knowedgle about HW, I just came from a break and offered my components for a week, since there was noone else who can work with HW, servers and stuff like this, manager offered me $500+HW cost if I, random intern, can make it work. I installed Debian on that little PC, created RAID1 from both SSDs, installed MySQL server and mirrored GIT server from our last standing server (we had two before one of them went lit 🔥), made simple Python script to copy all data on that RAID, with some help of our database guy copied whole DB from production to this little computer and edited some PHP so every SQL request made on our server will run on that NUC too. Everything after ±2 hours worked perfectly. Untill a fucking PSU burned in our server and took RAID controller with him in sillicon heaven next night, so we could not access any data unltill we got a new one. Thanks to every god out there, I was able to create software RAID from survived HDDs on our production server and copy all data from that NUC on the servers software RAID and make it working at 3 AM in the night before an exam 😂. Without this, we would be next ±40 hours without aerver running and we might loose soke of our data and customers. So my little skill with Linux, Python, MySQL and most importantly my NUC hardware I got that day running as a backup server saved maybe whole company 😂.
Btw, guess who is now employee of the year with $2500 bonus? 😀
Sorry for bragging and log post, but I was so lucky an so happy when everything worked out, good luck to all sysadmins out there! 👍
TL:DR: Random intern saved company and made some money 😂7 -
I would like to invite you all to test the project that a friend and me has been working on for a few months.
We aim to offer a fair, cheap and trusty alternative to proprietary services that perform data mining and sells information about you to other companies/entities.
Our goal is that users can (if they want) remain anonymous against us - because we are not interested in knowing who you are and what you do, like or want.
We also aim to offer a unique payment system that is fair, good and guarantees your intergrity by offer the ability to pay for the previous month not for the next month, by doing that you do not have to pay for a service that you does not really like.
Please note that this is still Free Beta, and we need your valuable experience about the service and how we can improve it. We have no ETA when we will launch the full service, but with your help we can make that process faster.
With this service, we do want to offer the following for now:
Nextcloud with 50 GB storage, yes you can mount it as a drive in Linux :)
Calendar
Email Client that you can connect to your email service (
SearX Instance
Talk ( voice and video chat )
Mirror for various linux distros
We are using free software for our environment - KVM + CEPH on our own hardware in our own facility. That means that we have complete control over the hosting and combined with one of the best ISP in the world - Bahnhof - we believe that we can offer something unique and/or be a compliment to your current services if you want to have more control over your data.
Register at:
https://operationtulip.com
Feel free to user our mirror:
https://mirror.operationtulip.com
Please send your feedback to:
feedback@operationtulip.com38 -
After returning back from the company we were purchasing a new phone system (hardware+software, $100K+, kind of a big deal)
VP: “I need the new phone system software integration for our CRM by next week. I need to demo the system for the other VPs”
Me: “No problem. Were you able to get their API like I asked?”
VP: “Salesman didn’t know for sure what that was, but he said all the developer software documentation is on their site.”
Me: “Did he give you a URL? Their main site is all marketing mumbo-jumbo. I assume there is another one specific for developers.”
VP: “Yea, he might have said something, but I don’t understand why you need it. The salesman said the integration would be seamless. He showed me several demos.”
Me: “No, I mean I need to know, is the API a full client install? a simple dll? is this going to be a web service integration? How will I know what to program against?”
VP: “I think I heard him say something about COM? Does that sound like an API?”
Me: “It’s a start. Did he provide you anything, a disk, a flash drive, anything with the software?”
VP: “No, only thing he told me was our CRM integration would be seamless and our development team would have no problems.”
Me: “OK..OK…I get it…he’s a salesman. Is there an 1-800 number I can call? A technical support email address? Anyone technical I can reach out to?”
VP: “Probably, but I don’t understand what the problem is. I need the CRM integrated by next week. I gave the other VPs a promise we would get it done. I do not break promises.”
Me: “Wait…when are we installing the new system?”
VP: “Well, the purchase order will be cut at the end of the month’s billing cycle, the company has about a two month turnaround time to deliver and install the hardware, so maybe 3 months from now? Are you going to be able to have the integration ready for next week?”
Me: “If we won’t see any of the hardware for 3 months, what exactly am I integrating with?”
VP: “That API you wanted or whatever it is. COM…yea, it’s COM. I was told the integration would be seamless and our developers would have no problem. I don’t understand why you can’t simply write the code to make it work. Getting the hardware installed is going to be the hardest part.”
Me: “OK, so I have no documentation, we have no hardware, no software, and no idea what this ‘seamless integration’ means. I’m afraid there isn’t anything I can do right now. ”
VP: “Fine!...I’ll just have to tell the other VPs you were not able to execute the seamless integration with the CRM.”
Which he did. When the hardware+software was finally installed, they hired consultants (because I “failed”). I think the bill was in the $50K range to perform the ‘integration’ which consisted of Excel spreadsheets (no kidding). When approached with the primary CRM integration, the team needed our API documentation, a year’s development time and $300K. I was pissed off enough, and I had the API documentation, I was able to get the basic CRM integration within 3 days. When an agent receives a call, I look up the # in our database, auto-fill the form with the customer info, etc. Easy stuff when you have the documentation.
The basics worked and the VP was congratulated by ‘saving’ the company $300K. May or may not have been bonuses involved, rumors still out on that one, but I didn't see em'. Later my manager told me the VP was really ticked that I performed the integration ‘behind his back’, but because it was a success, he couldn’t fire me.10 -
As a software engineer, I decided to participate in a hardware Hackathon. I went in not knowing much about the subject, but by the end of the weekend, we made a fully functioning (somewhat janky) jacket that could roll up or roll down its own sleeves depending on what your body temperature was (inspired by Back to the Future 2). We also created a remote, so you could control the length of the sleeves as well. It was the most off-the-wall, ballin project I've ever been a part of.10
-
Hi,
I'm not a ranty person so I never actually thought I'd post anything here but here it goes.
From the beginning.
We use ancient technologies. PHP 5.2, Symfony 1.2 and a non RFC complient SOAP with NO documentation.
A year ago We've been thrown a new temporary project. An VOIP app for every OS.
That being iOS, Android, MAC, PC, Linux, Windows mobile. With a 3 month deadline. All that thrown at 4 PHP developers. The idea being that They'll take it, sign the delivery protocol, everyone happy. No more updates for the app needed. They get their funds they needed the app for and we get paid.
Fast forward to today...
Our dev team started the year with great news that We'll most likely have to create a new project. Since the amount of new features would be far greater than current feature set, we managed to finally force our boss to use newer technologies (ie. seperate backend symfony4 PHP7+/frontend react, rest api and so on). So we were ecstatic to say the least. With preestimates aimed at a minimum 3 month development period. Since we're comfortable with everything that needs to be done.
Two days later our boss came to me that one of our most annoying clients needs a new feature. Said client uses ancient version written on a napkin because They changed half of the specification 2 weaks before deadline in a software made not by a developer but some sysadmin who didn't know anything. His MVC model was practically VVV model since he even had sql queries in some views. Feature will take 3 days - fixing everything that will break in the meantime - 1-2 months.
F*** it, fine. A little overtime won't kill me.
Yesterday boss comes again... Apparently someone lost a delivery protocol for a project we ended that half a year ago. Whats even better at the time when we asked for hardware to test we never got any. When we asked about any testing enviornment - nothing. The app being SEMI-stable on everything is an overstatement but it was working on the os'es available at the time. Since the client started testing now again, it turns out that both Android app does not work on 8.1/9 and the iOS app does not work on ios12. The client obviously does not want to pay and we can do little with it without the protocol, other than rewriting the apps.
It will take months at least since all of those apps were written by people that didn't know neither the OS'es nor the languages. For example I started writing the iOS one in swift. Only to learn after half of the development time, that swift doesn't like working by C Library rules and I had to use ObjC also. With some C thrown in due to the library. 3 unknown languages, on an unknown platform in 3 months. I never had any apple device in my hand at that time nor do I intend to now. I'm astonished it worked out then. It was a clusterf**k of bad design and sticking everything together with deprecated apis and a gum. So I'll have to basically fully rewrite it.
If boss decides we'll take all those at the same time I'll f***ing jump of a bridge.8 -
TIL that TI has no goddamn chill
Texas Instruments released the TI-83+ calculator model in 1996. The Z80 was not at all stock and has the following features:
- 3 access levels (priveleged kernel, kernel, user)
- Locking Flash (R/O when locked for most pages, some pages protected and unreadable as well, only unlockable from protected Flash pages by reading a certain order of bits then setting a port)
- Locking hardware ports (lock state always the same as flash)
- Customizable execution whitelist range (via locked ports)
- Configurable hardware (Flash/RAM size changeable in software via locked ports, max RAM is 8MB which is fucking mental compared to the 64k in the thing)
- Userland virtualization (always-on)
- Reset on violation of security model
- Multithreading
- Software-overclockable CPU
- Hardware MD5 and cert handling
TI made a calculator in 1996 with security features PCs wouldn't see until like 2010 what the *actual* fuck10 -
Help.
I'm a hardware guy. If I do software, it's bare-metal (almost always). I need to fully understand my build system and tweak it exactly to my needs. I'm the sorta guy that needs memory alignment and bitwise operations on a daily basis. I'm always cautious about processor cycles, memory allocation, and power consumption. I think twice if I really need to use a float there and I consider exactly what cost the abstraction layers I build come at.
I had done some web design and development, but that was back in the day when you knew all the workarounds for IE 5-7 by heart and when people were disappointed there wasn't going to be a XHTML 2.0. I didn't build anything large until recently.
Since that time, a lot has happened. Web development has evolved in a way I didn't really fancy, to say the least. Client-side rendering for everything the server could easily do? Of course. Wasting precious energy on mobile devices because it works well enough? Naturally. Solving the simplest problems with a gigantic mess of dependencies you don't even bother to inspect? Well, how else are you going to handle all your sensitive data?
I was going to compare this to the Arduino culture of using modules you don't understand in code you don't understand. But then again, you don't see consumer products or customer-specific electronics powered by an Arduino (at least not that I'm aware of).
I'm just not fit for that shooting-drills-at-walls methodology for getting holes. I'm not against neither easy nor pretty-to-look-at solutions, but it just comes across as wasteful for me nowadays.
So, after my hiatus from web development, I've now been in a sort of internet platform project for a few months. I'm now directly confronted with all that you guys love and hate, frontend frameworks and Node for the backend and whatever. I deliberately didn't voice my opinion when the stack was chosen, because I didn't want to interfere with the modern ways and instead get some experience out of it (and I am).
And now, I'm slowly starting to feel like it was OKAY to work like this.10 -
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.10 -
Had 2 days of vacation. Theoretically (plus weekend, plus 2 days) 6 days.
Worked today… At Saturday.
Some administrators forgot to properly check bandwidth limitations....
*rolls eyes*
We had a major version upgrade of some server software at Monday.
Guess why I got called...
Of course it MUST be the software upgrade.
It couldn't be the new hardware that was setup 2 weeks ago and on which a lot of "important" VMs were migrated.
*eyes roll inside till only white is visible*
The even more annoying thing is that it wasn't that hard to figure out.
Looking at monitoring, we had spikes on 20 Gbit/s (roughly 2.x Gigabyte/sec - Ethernet) connection of some server at roughly 1.9 plus Gigabyte/sec.
IO latency spikes that made the graph look like a heartbeat EKG with severe tachycardia...
*additionally to white eyes starts cursing in reverse latin*
Incompetent admin answer: Booboo that can only be your fault - the developers must investigate.
Me (just a tad more polite): Meep Meep mother fucker, get your shit together. If the software would eat that much, the network would be a niece chunk of charcoal. Plus the time (sending instead of links to monitoring pictures… guess the lazy fucktard who's brain is a vacuum didn't even bother to check it)...
NOTICE SOMETHING?!
Incompetent admin: It starts at the same time. Always.
After wasting roughly another hour of time discussing with him, I just hanged up the video call.
Called someone I knew from the admin department and turns out that - drumrolls please - the incompetent admin was someone who got recruited 3 months ago…
*turning into antichrist*
I then had a not so polite discussion about how the only competent people could take days off (all except incompetent admin were on vacation) and the seemingly incompetent fresh recruit - who by the way NEVER mentioned this - was the only one left of the admin department. Which would be bad alone, but no - he even got the 24/7 emergency support role for the whole weekend.
Sometimes this company and HR especially notoriously drive me insane...
Guess next week there will be some HR barbecue.
But yeah. After a lot of raging around we nailed it down to the traffic of backups and could fix it.
Roughly 4 hours of analysis, communication, raging and hatred.
Just one hour implementing shit.
*goozfraba*11 -
A PCB I designed on the job over the last weeks shipped today! A benefit of hardware is the haptic element you have at the end of the design process - you made something touchable. (I am proud.)
Also, errors made earlier in the design process are permanent now. But other than on my software my design got reviewed, so I'm optimistic it'll not contain many if any.
I'm on vacation right now for moving stuff but I'm looking forward to do the "pick'n place" on monday. Soldering manually is quite relaxing for me, you should try it, too! ;)
In other news, I'm no longer sleeping on the floor in my home-office while the paint is drying in other rooms.
I already moved the most of my stuff - books and tech equipment are the worst - and I moved my furniture yesterday.
My new roommates are considerably quieter and my sleeping rhythm is slowly shifting back to normal.10 -
Alright, I've already ranted about this but I feel like that was rather incomplete.. there's some other things that make me want to kill myself every time I enter <!DOCT- WHERE IS THAT FUCKING KNIFE?!!!
First one I've mentioned earlier is its <repetitiveness></repetitiveness>. What was wrong with {brackets}? If only HTML was more like CSS.
But there's some other ones as well.
- Frameworks! Ain't there nothing like a good dozen resources that every single one of your web pages wants to get JS from.
- Quantity over quality. Let's just publish early with tonnes of bugs, move fast and break things, amirite 🤪
- General noobness of apprentice web devs. Now I'm not talking about the real front-end devs here - AlexDeLarge was one of them.. forever holding a special place in my heart - that know how to properly use their tools. But there's a metric shitton of people who think that being able to write <html><body>Hello world!</body></html> makes them a dev.
- The general thought of "it's slow? Slap in more hardware." Now this is a general issue with software development, optimization costs valuable resources while leaving it in a shitty state but released quickly costs pretty much nothing. A friend of mine whose post I'll attach in the image section illustrates this pretty well. You can find it at https://facebook.com/10000171480431....
I'm not sure if this is an exhaustive list, but those are the most important things that irritate me about web development in general.
On a side note, apparently 113 people visited my hiddenbio.html page.. I'm genuinely impressed! I had no idea that so many people on devRant would click through. On Facebook pages this has been an ongoing significant issue of getting people to leave the platform - it's huge but engagement on off-Facebook links is terrible. I guess that I'm dealing with an entirely different community here. And I'm pleasantly surprised actually!
11 -
TLDR: There’s truth in the motto “fake it till you make it”
Once upon a time in January 2018 I began work as a part time sysadmin intern for a small financial firm in the rural US. This company is family owned, and the family doesn’t understand or invest in the technology their business is built on. I’m hired on because of my minor background in Cisco networking and Mac repair/administration.
I was the only staff member with vendor certifications and any background in networking / systems administration / computer hardware. There is an overtaxed web developer doing sysadmin/desktop support work and hating it.
I quickly take that part of his job and become the “if it has electricity it’s his job to fix it” guy. I troubleshoot Exchange server and Active Directory problems, configure cloudhosted web servers and DNS records, change lightbulbs and reboot printers in the office.
After realizing that I’m not an intern but actually just a cheap sysadmin I began looking for work that pays appropriately and is full time. I also change my email signature to say “Company Name: Network Administrator”
A few weeks later the “HR” department (we have 30 employees, it’s more like “The accountant who checks hiring paperwork”) sends out an email saying that certain ‘key’ departments have no coverage at inappropriate times. I don’t connect the dots.
Two days later I receive a testy email from one of the owners telling me that she is unhappy with my lack of time spent in the office. That as the Network Administrator I have responsibilities, and I need to be available for her and others 8-5 when problems need troubleshooting. Her son is my “boss” who is rarely in the office and has almost no technical acumen. He neglected to inform her that I’m a part time employee.
I arrange a meeting in which I propose that I be hired on full time as the Network Administrator to alleviate their problems. They agree but wildly underpay me. I continue searching for work but now my resume says Network Administrator.
Two weeks ago I accepted a job offer for double my current salary at a local software development firm as a junior automation engineer. They said they hired me on with so little experience specifically because of my networking background, which their ops dept is weak in. I highlighted my 6 months experience as Network Administrator during my interviews.
My take away: Perception matters more than reality. If you start acting like something, people will treat you like that.2 -
So, a few years ago I was working at a small state government department. After we has suffered a major development infrastructure outage (another story), I was so outspoken about what a shitty job the infrastructure vendor was doing, the IT Director put me in charge of managing the environment and the vendor, even though I was actually a software architect.
Anyway, a year later, we get a new project manager, and she decides that she needs to bring in a new team of contract developers because she doesn't trust us incumbents.
They develop a new application, but won't use our test team, insisting that their "BA" can do the testing themselves.
Finally it goes into production.
And crashes on Day 1. And keeps crashing.
Its the infrastructure goes out the cry from her office, do something about it!
I check the logs, can find nothing wrong, just this application keeps crashing.
I and another dev ask for the source code so that we can see if we can help find their bug, but we are told in no uncertain terms that there is no bug, they don't need any help, and we must focus on fixing the hardware issue.
After a couple of days of this, she called a meeting, all the PMs, the whole of the other project team, and me and my mate. And she starts laying into us about how we are letting them all down.
We insist that they have a bug, they insist that they can't have a bug because "it's been tested".
This ends up in a shouting match when my mate lost his cool with her.
So, we went back to our desks, got the exe and the pdb files (yes, they had published debug info to production), and reverse engineered it back to C# source, and then started looking through it.
Around midnight, we spotted the bug.
We took it to them the next morning, and it was like "Oh". When we asked how they could have tested it, they said, ah, well, we didn't actually test that function as we didn't think it would be used much....
What happened after that?
Not a happy ending. Six months later the IT Director retires and she gets shoed in as the new IT Director and then starts a bullying campaign against the two of us until we quit.5 -
Since fucking when did "bare metal" mean just running on an OS?? At a conference and literally everyone is like "we got kubernetes running on bare metal", got super excited for a bit because just the idea of that sounds amazing but they're using it as slang for "basically not in a container or vm."
Nothing exciting at all. Now we're patting ourselves on the back for getting software working without it being preconfigured as a container or a VM image. No one knows how to do anything any more. MUCH too much abstraction going on.
I guess it keeps me more employable, but the state of the world from a developer standpoint is just sad.
(For reference, this is what the first sentence of "Bare Metal" looks like on wikipedia "In computer science, bare machine (or bare metal) refers to a computer executing instructions directly on logic hardware without an intervening operating system.")4 -
When working with hardware some mistakes can be literally painful. Thankfully this was all during undergrad and I'm only around computer hardware now lol.
>Misprogrammed a software kill switch so a sensor that should not have been sending data was actually sending data which caused the system to activate a piston that went WHAM! into the face of a teammate working on replacing some part of it...
>Misprogrammed a controller so it drew too much power from the supply and the puny supply wires literally burst into flame and fell across my arm.
>Spun a 9000rpm CNC spindle the wrong way and caused an attached screw to go rocketing upwards instead of downwards and almost break the (pretty expensive) thing (uh...we were trying to use it as a power screwdriver essentially but I set the rpm to about 100x what I wanted and the direction wrong so yeah).
>Switched a -1 with a +1 in a robot's control system sending it careening into a teammate's leg... let's just say mecanum wheels are paaaainful.6 -
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!!!12 -
I miss the good times when the web was lightweight and efficient.
I miss the times when essential website content was immediately delivered as HTML through the first HTTP request.
I miss the times when I could open a twitter URL and have the tweet text appear on screen in two seconds rather than a useless splash screen followed by some loading spinners.
I miss the times when I could open a YouTube watch page and see the title and description on screen in two seconds rather than in ten.
I miss the times when YouTube comments were readily loaded rather than only starting to load when I scroll down.
JavaScript was lightweight and used for its intended purpose, to enhance the experience by loading content at the page bottom and by allowing interaction such as posting comments without having to reload the entire page, for example.
Now pretty much all popular websites are bloated with heavy JavaScript. Your browser needs to walk through millions of bytes of JavaScript code just to show a tweet worth 200 bytes of text.
The watch page of YouTube (known as "polymer", used since 2017) loads more than eight megabytes of JavaScript last time I checked. In 2012, it was one to two hundred kilobytes of HTML and at most a few hundred kilobytes of JavaScript, mostly for the HTML5 player.
And if one little error dares to occur on a JavaScript-based page, you get a blank page of nothingness.
Sure, computers are more powerful than they used to be. But that does not mean we should deliberately make our new software and website slower and more bloated.
"Wirth's law is an adage on computer performance which states that software is getting slower more rapidly than hardware is becoming faster."
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
A presentation by Jake Archibald from 2015, but more valid than ever: https://youtube.com/watch/...
34 -
-Hi, my PlayStation’s storage is almost full? Can you change it?
Me: yes, but why not just buy an external one....
-We can’t add games on it.
Me: ... See here. Read. It’s possible. How much storage does the PS have now?
-93GB
Me: ... Total? 500 GB?
-Yes, I think.
Me: buy a 4 TB one will last long enough.
-Ok. Can you come to install it if it’s arrived?
Me: Ok...
Can’t people just read on fucking internet how to connect an external drive to a PlayStation??
I don’t understand... I’m a software guy not fucking hardware...11 -
5 stages of failing WIFI connectivity on Linux
This morning I woke up my laptop to start my work day. I have 2 very important meetings today, so I better get all prepared.
"Wifi connection failed"
Syslog says:
- wpa_supplicant: wlp9s0: SME: Trying to authenticate with <MAC>
- kernel: wlp9s0: authenticate with <MAC>
- kernel: wl9s0: send auth to <MAC> (try 1/3)
- kernel: wl9s0: send auth to <MAC> (try 2/3)
- kernel: iwlwifi: Not associated and the session protection is over already...
- kernel: wl9s0: send auth to <MAC> (try 3/3)
- kernel: wl9s0: authentication with <MAC> timed out
#### DENIAL #####
No biggie, let's try another AP (I have 3). All 3 failed to connect. Fine, let's try my phone's hotspot! FAILED!!!!!
w00t.... okay, let's restart the router... but failing to connect to a phone hotspot is already a worrying sign.
Wifi connection failed
wtf.. disable and re-enable wifi
Wifi connection failed
#### ANGER #####
the fuuuuuuck. Maybe my router is dead. But my phone connects to it, no fuss. My personal lappy also connects there easily.
wtf... Does that mean I'm about to lose my uptime?? Come one!! It's Linux - there MUST be something I could do! I don't see processes hanging in D state so the radio must be fine - it's gotta be a software issue!
ChatGPT – type all the log entries manually, via phone (that took a while...). Nothing useful there: update firmware, restart NetworkManager, etc.
#### BARGAINING #####
Alright... How about a USB dongle? Plug it in and wifi connects immediately! Yayyy!!! But that's only b/g/n and I'd very much like to have ac. It works well as a limping backup, but not something I'd use for the meetings.
rfkill block/unblock all the radios. No change. USB dongle connects right away but the PCIe adapter keeps throwing notifications at me with failure messages. It's annoying, to say the least.
So I've already tried
- restarting the router(s)
- disabling/reenabling the radios
- multiple APs
- suspending/waking again several times
- praying
#### DEPRESSION #####
The only thing I haven't tried yet is the most cruel one - restarting the laptop. But that's unfair... It's LINUX! How could it disappoint me. I have so many tmux sessions open, so many unsaved leafpad notes, terminal histories with oh so comfy ^r and ! retriggers all ready and waiting to be executed...
#### ACCEPTANCE #####
But I can't miss the meeting. So I slowly start closing off apps, starting with the least important ones, trying to preserve as much history and recent commands as I can. I'm gonna lose my uptime, that's the inevitable obvious truth... Linux has failed me. Or maybe it's a hardware issue... I can't be sure until I restart.
I must reboot.
#### A NEW HOPE #####
Hold on.. What if... What if before restarting I try to reload the Intel wifi kernel module? Just for the giggles. I've got nothing to lose anyway...
rmmod iwlmvm
rmmod iwlwifi
modprobe iwlwifi
modprobe iwlmvm
*WiFi Connected*
YESSSS!!!!!!!!! My uptime is saved!
403 days and counting! YEAH BABY!!!
Linux is the best!8 -
I finally fucking made it!
Or well, I had a thorough kick in my behind and things kinda fell into place in the end :-D
I dropped out of my non-tech education way too late and almost a decade ago. While I was busy nagging myself about shit, a friend of mine got me an interview for a tech support position and I nailed it, I've been messing with computers since '95 so it comes easy.
For a while I just went with it, started feeling better about myself, moved up from part time to semi to full time, started getting responsibilities. During my time I have had responsibility for every piece of hardware or software we had to deal with. I brushed up documentation, streamlined processes, handled big projects and then passed it on to 'juniors' - people pass through support departments fast I guess.
Anyway, I picked up rexx, PowerShell and brushed up on bash and windows shell scripting so when it felt like there wasn't much left I wanted to optimize that I could easily do with scripting I asked my boss for a programming course and free hands to use it to optimize workflows.
So after talking to programmer friends, you guys and doing some research I settled on C# for it's broad application spectrum and ease of entry.
Some years have passed since. A colleague and I built an application to act as portal for optimizations and went on to automate AD management, varius ssh/ftp jobs and backend jobs with high manual failure rate, hell, towards the end I turned in a hobby project that earned myself in 10 times in saved hours across the organization. I felt pretty good about my skills and decided I'd start looking for something with some more challenge.
A year passed with not much action, in part because I got comfy and didn't send out many applications. Then budget cuts happened half a year ago and our Branch's IT got cut bad - myself included.
I got an outplacement thing with some consultant firm as part of the goodbye package and that was just hold - got control of my CV, hit LinkedIn and got absolutely swarmed by recruiters and companies looking for developers!
So here I am today, working on an AspX webapp with C# backend, living the hell of a codebase left behind by someone with no wish to document or follow any kind of coding standards and you know what? I absolutely fucking love it!
So if you're out there and in doubt, do some competence mapping, find a nice CV template, update your LinkedIn - lots of sources for that available and go search, the truth is out there! -
"Smart" home gym equipment: expensive hardware for some grand, proprietary software, and ongoing subscription fees in the $50/mo ballpark.
The SW is usually designed so that even shit that could have been local is instead stored remote as to make the subscription look more worthwhile. The large front-up cost serves not only as revenue, but also to anchor the vendor lock-in.
Open source hackers could potentially unchain the HW so that users would actually own what they purchased, but there is a catch: the HW is sold at a loss, and the subscription is the business model.
Freeing up the HW would render the subscription rather useless, and ramping up the HW sales prices to profitability would destroy any demand.
Basically, it's products that are technically feasible, but not economically viable. Which is why they are not the future of home gyms.22 -
Last week one of my clients asked me to visit their HQ to take a look at some report tool that has stopped to generate reports. This tool was not made by me, it has zero documentation, but WTH, I can take a look.
So I went to the HQ. When a guy that has called me told me that someone else will be here any second to talk to me, I began to be a little suspicius.
It turned out they want a new app. Not going into detail something that will read bar codes, do some stuff in a database, generate some reports etc. And he need it made in 2 weeks. I have reminded him I am involved in another project that I need to deliver in a month, and it is virutally impossible for me to develop what they want in this time. I offered them that maybe we should hire a team or at least another developer. Hi nodded and ignored what I've said. Well, he said we have maybe 2 weeks more, but that's it. Ok..
So, while working on the other project wich ramained a priority for me, I've began to do some thinking, some research on how to deliver what they want as fast as possible.
Today morning I went to the HQ again to finally take care of that report tool. But never mind that, I also had a chance to talk about the new app. So we made some Agile, wrote down epics, stories, talked about hardware etc. After two hours, it turned out, that more than this bardcode reading app the need something else! Barcode reading yes, but even more they need a scheduler for their emloyees, custom functionalities, plus some HR tools, other fancy stuff. But they don't even have a full concept yet. And it needs to be done until end of the month (9 days), maybe two weeks later.
So again I told them I will not be able to deliver this in set timeframe. That possibly we need to hire someone and even then it's questionable if this will be possible given all circumstances, time needed test, to deploy (in 14 diffrent locations all over the country). Actually if I had all software ready today the deployment, tests, training... So I offered that maybe we can figure out some temporary solution based on third party software.
At this point my requests and suggestions have been ignored again. Sadly my contract with them states I can not pass this to someone else, it all have to go trough them. And tehy don't want to spend extra money (??) etc.
Also from what I understand, this whole company's (~1000 employees) be or not to be can be affected by this project.
Sometimes I just don't understand business.1 -
Cracking old recovery CDs for the 9x/2000/XP era shines some light into how companies operated and when concepts came to be in that time:
Packard Bell: An EXE checks that you're running on a Packard Bell machine and reboots if it's not. How do we bypass it? Easy: just fucking delete it. The files to reinstall Windows from scratch come from...
...
C:?
Yup. Turns out Packard Bell was doing the recovery partition thing all the way back to the 9x era, maybe even further. Files aren't even on the restore disc so if your partition table got fucked (pretty common because malware and disk corruption) you were totally fucked and needed to repurchase Windows. (My dad, at the time, only charged at-cost OEM prices for a replacement retail copy. He knew it was dumb so he never sold PB machines.)
Compaq:
Computer check? Nope, remove one line from a BATCH file and it's gone.
Six archives, named "WINA.ZIP" through "WINF.ZIP" (plus one or two extras for OEM software) hold Windows. Problematic? Well... only because they never put the password anywhere so the installer can't install them. (Some interesting on-disc technician-only utils, though!)
Dell:
If not a Dell machine, lock up. Cause? CONFIG.SYS driver masquerading as OAK (the common CD driver) doing the check, then chainloading the real OAK driver. Simple fix: replace the fake driver with the real one.
Issues?
Would I mention this one if there weren't?
Disc is mounted on N:. Subdirectories work, but doing anything in them (a DIR, trying to execute something, trying to view shit in EDIT.COM) kicked you back to the disc root.
Installer couldn't find machine manifest in the MAP folder (it wanted your PC's serial before it'd let you install, to make sure you have the correct recovery disc) so it asked for 12-digit alphanumeric serial. The defined serials in the manifest were something like "02884902-01" or similar (8-2, all numbers) and it couldn't read the file so it couldn't show the right format, nor check for the right type.
Bypassing that issue, trying to do the ACTUAL install process caused nothing to happen... as all BATCHes for install think the CD should be on X:.
Welp.
well that was fun. Now to test on-real-PC behavior, as VBOX and VMWare both don't like the special hardware shit it tries to use. (Why does a textmode GUI need GPU acceleration, COMPAQ?????)4 -
Was forced to do some work on Windows this week (CAD tools that runs only on Windows). I spent a few days just setting up the tools. There were quite a few things I realized I forgot about Windows (as compared to Linux).
1) Installation times are down right horrific. What exactly are the installer doing for 10 minutes?
2) .NET is a cluster fuck. Not even Microsofts repair tool can fix it, but rather just hangs. I ended up using another tool to nuke it and reinstall.
3) Windows binary installs are insanely huge, thus, takes forever to download.
4) The registry is a pointless database that must have been written in hell with the single intent of destroying users will to live. The sole existence of the registry is another proof that completely incompetent engineers designed Windows.
5) Rebooting is the only way to solve many problems. This is another sure sign of a fundamentally fucked up OS design.
6) What the heck is wrong with the GUIs designers? The control panel must be the worst design ever. There are so many levels to get to a particular setting I'm getting dizzy. Nothing gets better by the illogical organisation.
7) Windows networking. A perversion of the tcp/ip stack that makes it virtually impossible to understand a damn thing about the current network configuration. There are at least 3 different places that effects the settings.
8) Windows command prompt. Why did they even bother to leave it in? The interpreter is as intelligent as retarded donut. You can't do anything with it, except typing "exit" and Google for another solution.
8) Updates. Why does it takes hundreds of updates per month to keep that thing safe?
9) Despite all updates that is flying out of Redmond like confetti, it is still necessary to install antivirus to keep the damn thing safe. That cost extra money, and further cost you by degrading performance of your hardware.
10) Window performance. Software runs like it was swimming in molasses. The final stab in the back on your hardware investment, and pretty much sends performance on your hardware back a few hundred bucks more.
11) Closed source is evil. If something crash consistently, you might find a forum that address the issues you have. Otherwise you're out of luck. On the other hand, it might be for the better. I imagine reading the code for Windows can lead to severe depression.
I'm lucky to be a Linux dev, and should probably not complain too much... But really, Windows, go get yourself hit by a truck and die. I won't miss you.14 -
This is the craziest shit... MY FUCKING SERVER JUST SET ON FIRE!!!
Like seriously its hot news (can't resist the puns), it's actually really bad news and I'm just in shock (it's not everyday you find out your running the hottest stack in the country :-P)... I thought it slow as fuck this morning but the office internet was also on the fritz so I carried on with my life until EVERYTHING went down (completely down - poof gone) and within 2 minutes I had a technician from the data centre telling me that something to do with fans had failed and they caught fire, melted and have become one with the hardware. WTF? The last time I went to the data centre it was so cold I pissed sitting down for 2 days because my dick vanished.
I'm just so fucking torn right now because initially I was absolutely fucking ecstatic - 1 week ago after a year of doomsday bitching about having a single point of failure and me not being a sysadmin only to have them look at me like I'm some kind of techie flat earther I finally got approval to spend around 5x more per month and migrate all our software to containerized micro services.
I'll admit this is a bit worse than I expected but thanks to last week at least I have recent off site images of the drives - because big surprise I have to set this monolithic beast back up (No small feat - its gonna be a long night) on a fresh VPS, I also have to do it on premises or the data will only finish uploading sometime next week.
Pro Tip: If your also pleading for more resources/better production environment only to be stone walled the second you mention there's a cost attached be like me - I gave them an ultimatum, either I deploy the software on a stack that's manageable or they man the fuck up and pay a sys admin (This idea got them really amped up until they checked how much decent sys admins cost).
Now I have very flexible pockets because even if I go rambo the max server costs would only be 15-20% of a sys admins paycheck even though that is 13 x more than our current costs.
-
Every project ever :
Initial plan :
||===================|| 100 %
Actual submission
||==|| 13%
- Not enough money!
- Not enough people!
- Not enough time!
- Not enough resources!
- Hardware not supported
- Software not supported
- My team are useless
- God didn't like it. :/1 -
"it's the software that's causing the problem not the hardware (that I picked)"
*extensive research is done by technicians and senior developer*
"what's the problem?"
"shit hardware (that you picked)" -
Free ebook: For people who are into hardware analysis, hardware/software design failures.
Hacking the Xbox
by Andrew "bunnie" Huang
It's ofc not state of the art, most techniques apply today still.
Download: http://bunniefoo.com/nostarch/...
maybe some here have a use for such book
6 -
A classmate's earphones once stopped working, I went to go look at it. After a bit of tinkering, I said, "The speakers on these are toast, you'll need a new pair." Then, some random kid grabbed the tablet mind you, and not the earphones, played in the settings, and said "Fixed." I then told them, "This is a hardware issue, not a software issue." What's worse? Some people said "So, software and hardware are the same thing."
Mississippi is just full of computer Illiterates.19 -
wllcnbeofozbv3-#:(#:wiwjzvfoblaa!!! If someone says "I don't have Discord, I don't play games" once more - I will run them over with a road roller. 90% of servers I am a member of are either for some open source software, open source hardware or some other non-gaming related community so stop with that "But I'm not a gamer" bullshit!12
-
Not at the hate point yet, but Apple's hardware division has been missing the mark for about 5-6 years now.
The phones have been too big for my hands since the 5 came out, and the latest lineup doesn't even have a compromise in that size.
The keyboards that replaced the chiclet keyboards suck because they provide almost no tactile feedback whatsoever.
Ditching the magsafe adaptors to force you to dedicate one of your USB ports to powering your machine is stupid.
Still doing fine on the software front overall, however. Granted, they've been dismantling everything I ever liked about iTunes since version 8 came out, but I've given up on that at this point.1 -
To this day I still don't know how the hell Nvidia makes some of the most powerful graphics cards available, yet manages to somehow also write the shittiest software among them. Somehow not only their control panel application takes an eternity to start, their context menu option makes that run like trash, and even Windows Explorer doesn't go unaffected.
But the solution as always: throw more hardware at it. Maybe that's why they make such powerful cards.9 -
Fuck you Intel.
Fucking admit that you're Hardware has a problem!
"Intel and other technology companies have been made aware of new security research describing software analysis methods that, when used for malicious purposes, have the potential to improperly gather sensitive data from computing devices that are operating as designed. Intel believes these exploits do not have the potential to corrupt, modify or delete data"
With Meltdown one process can fucking read everything that is in memory. Every password and every other sensible bit. Of course you can't change sensible data directly. You have to use the sensible data you gathered... Big fucking difference you dumb shits.
Meltown occurs because of hardware implemented speculative execution.
The solution is to fucking separate kernel- and user-adress space.
And you're saying that your hardware works how it should.
Shame on you.
I'm not saying that I don't tolerate mistakes like this. Shit happens.
But not having the balls to admit that it is because of the hardware makes me fucking angry.5 -
About 3 years ago, my girlfriend had this laptop that she got from her University. She had to give the laptop back to get reset, but didn't want to lose all of her data on it, and a backup would be around 750GB.
So I suggested that I would backup the laptop (was thinking to just dd an image and go from there). So I plugged in my mobile USB and external hard drive, and started the imaging process. Given the amount of data and setup, the process should have taken about 5hours. So we left it there for 5h.
Please be mindful that at this stage in my life I knew very little about boot processes, oses, and hardware.
5h after. The laptop screen is black and it ain't responsive. Not sure what happened, the dd process was completed, but the laptop refused to boot into windows. Tried a number of boot tools, and spent a crazy night hacking at the machine. But the university had some of sort of fail safe to not allow anyone to boot into windows if someone opened bios without entering a password. Whatever this was, I spent over 12h trying to either open mount the windows partition with a Ubuntu usb or mount the corrupt dd image on my laptop.
Long story short, after throwing at it a number of fixes. I was able to mount the image, copy out all of her personal data, and reinstall a new version of Windows on her laptop. The university didnt understand why the laptop was already reset. She still mentions this to me anytime I want to take a "custom approach" to software lol2 -
I think I finally found a reason to have a phone with 8GB of RAM.
So that when TWRP craps out on data decryption and decides not even to ask for a password, at least I can push a whole fucking ROM into RAM to unfuck the phone. Because why not?! Why on Earth would software work properly when you can just throw more hardware at it?
Long live FBE, TWRP what craps out on it, and you remember those things.. SD cards for data storage? I could've used an unencrypted SD card so fucking badly right now, you know... Long live soldered in storage that's encrypted, "for security". Except for when the person who owns said data actually wants to use the bloody data.
FUCK!2 -
What was your most ridiculous story related to IT?
Mine was when I was quite small (11yo) and wanted a graphics card (the epoch of ATI Radeon 9800), looked at the invoice to know what kind of ports I had in the pc (did not open it), then proceeded to brat to my dad to get me a new GPU
So we where in Paris, we went to a shop, vendor asked me "PCI or AGP?" and said AGP.
Paris > London > Isle of Skye roadtrip followed, then as my dad brought me back home in Switzerland, we opened my pc...
And we couldn't fit the GPU in the basic old PCI port. My Dad was pissed. He frustratedly tried fitting the GPU in the PCI slot, but nope. (He's a software engineer though)
At least the GPU had 256 mb of ram :D
Gave it to my brother 6 months later at family gathering
To this day, my Dad still thinks I cannot handle hardware, although I have successfully built 10+ pc, and still cringes with a laughing smile when I talk to him about it haha
Ah well.1 -
I fucking hate stupid accountants!
Yesterday we went to a customer to talk to the accountants because we want to remove one of their unused PC's in the office.
First, just the way they think (and talk if) they are the most important and it's absolutely critical everything works 100%. I see they are important but not 100 times more important than everybody else!
They called us their EDP-guys (EDV in German, that's the translation I found). That insulted me a bit. I'm rather called IT-guy, I don't know anything about the fucking EDP systems nor want I to. I'm there to make sure the hardware works. But whatever, fine, call me what you want.
Then they straight up threatened us, because their work is so important, they can't afford to have downtime in their systems. They don't really care, but the bosses of us both do and if we fuck up they (the bosses) will hold us responsible. There is a fucking update for your piece of shit software (datev)! I don't do the update, I'm just responsible that the update can be deployed on the hardware. I'm not responsible if this update fucks your system and frankly I don't care!
I could tell them all of this but they won't listen. They always talk in this patronising arrogant voice, because they are so important and we better don't fuck up the update.
I'm there to help. I don't want downtime for your systems. I want you to work with our systems the best you can.
But fuck you, I hope the server burns down!13 -
So my father has to deal with some vendors providing niche hardware and software solutions for a single department in the company.
Once the hardware finishes its work and transfers results to the managing PC, the PC has to upload those results to the server on the internet. The problem is that if no one's working with that setup for a few minutes the software in the PC can no longer communicate with the server.
Naturally, since idle time is in the equation, I thought of SO_KEEPALIVE (or whatever it's called in Windows). Wireshark confirms the absence of keepalive packets. However, the app doesn't seem to have any means to enable it... Hence the need to work with support guys.
One would expect the support to be professional, experts considering anything related to the app.
One would NOT expect to receive a call: "Hey, look, I was doing some googling on the internet... You might be right, enabling KA might help with the issue. We were discussing with our engineers and we tried to find some application that could enable KA on your computer. We couldn't find anything, but we believe that's the way to go. So give it a try and try to find some app on the internet that enables KA for our proprietary application". // everything in Lithuanian ofc.
I mean...seriously...?
I was startled to hear this suggestion. Since I expected them to be experts I assumed there's something IDK about Windows sockets -- could Windows enable KA globally, by-default? Did not find such a thing. Could Windows allow application A to control application B's socket options? Frankly, I'm too afraid to even look for this. I dislike Windows already. If this turned out to be true I'd probably become an anti-windows evangelist.4 -
How many programmers does it take to screw in a lightbulb?
It doesn't matter. Its a hardware problem not a software problem...1 -
Must nearly every recently-made piece of software be terrible?
Firefox runs terribly slowly on a four-core 1.6GHz processor when given eight (8) gigabytes of RAM. Discord's user interface is awfully slow and uses unnecessary animations. Google's stuff is just falling apart; a toaster notification regarding MRO stock was recently pushed such that some markup elements of this notification were visible in the notification, the download links which are generated by Google Drive have sometimes returned error 404, and Google's software is overall sluggish and somewhat unstable. Today, an Android phone failed to update the Google Drive application... and failed to return a meaningful error message. Comprehensive manuals appear to be increasingly often not provided. Microsoft began to digest Windows after Windows XP was released.
Laziness is not virtuous.
For all computer programs, a computer program should be written such that this computer program performs well on reasonably terrible hardware... and kept simple. The UNIX philosophy is woefully underappreciated.37 -
I'm convinced this is going to be wildly unpopular, but hey...
Please stop writing stuff in C! Aside from a few niche areas (performance-critical, embedded, legacy etc. workloads) there's really no reason to other than some fumbled reason about "having full control over the hardware" and "not trusting these modern frameworks." I get it, it's what we all grew up with being the de-facto standard, but times have moved on, and the number of massive memory leaks & security holes that keep coming to light in *popular*, well-tested software is a great reason why you shouldn't think you're smart enough to avoid all those issues by taking full control yourself.
Especially, if like most C developers I've come across, you also shun things like unit tests as "something the QA department should worry about" 😬12 -
Sometimes I just don't know what to say anymore
I'm working on my engine and I really wanna push high triangle counts. I'm doing a pretty cool technique called visibility rendering and it's great because it kind of balances out some known causes of bad performance on GPUs (namely that pixels are always rasterized in quads, which is especially bad for small triangles)
So then I come across this post https://tellusim.com/compute-raster... which shows some fantastic results and just for the fun of it I implement it. Like not optimized or anything just a quick and dirty toy demo to see what sort of performance I can get
... I just don't know what to say. Using actual hardware accelerated rasterization, which GPUs are literally designed to be good at, I render about 37 million triangles in 3.6 ms. Eh, fine but not great. Then I implement this guys unoptimized(!) software rasterizer and I render the same scene in 0.5 ms?!
IT'S LITERALLY A COMPUTE SHADER. I rasterize the triangles manually IN SOFTWARE and write them out with 64-bit atomic image stores. HOW IS THIS FASTER THAN ACTUAL HARDWARE!???
AND BY LIKE A ORDER OF MAGNITUDE AT THAT???
Like I even tried doing some optimizations like backface cone culling on the meshlets, but doing that makes it slower. HOW. Im rendering 37 million triangles without ANY fancy tricks. No hi-z depth culling which a GPU would normally do. No backface culling which a GPU with normally do. Not even damn clipping of triangles. I render ALL of them ALL the time. At 0.5 ms7 -
So I enventually spent 2 years working for that company with a strong b2b market. Everything from the checkouts in their 6 b2c stores to the softwares used by the 30-people sales team was dependant on the main ERP shit home-built with this monstruosity we call Windev here in France. If you don't know it just google and have some laugh : this is a proprieteray FRENCH language. Not french like made by french people, well that too, but mostly french like the fucking language is un fucking french ! Instructions are on french, everything. Hey that's my natural language okay, but for code, really ?
The php website was using the ERP database too, even all the software/hardware of the massive logistic installation they had (like a tiny Amazon depot), and of course the emails of all employees. Everything was just handled by this unique shitty and so sloooooow fucking app. When there was to many clients on the website or even too many salespeople connected to the ERP at the same time, every-fuckin-piece of the company was slowing down, and even worse facing critical bugs. So they installed a monitor in the corner of a desk constantly showing the live report page of Google analytics and they started panic attacks everytime it was counting more than 30 sessions on the website. That was at the time fun and sad to observe.
The whole shit was created 12 years ago and is since maintened locally by one unique old-fashion-microsoft dev who also have to maintain all the hardware of all the fucking 150+ people business. You know, when the keyboard of anyone is "broken" cause it's unplugged... That's his job too. The poor guy was totally overstressed on a daily basis and his tech knowledge just saddly losts themeselves somewhere in the way. He was my n+1 in a tech team of 3 people : him, a young and inexperimented so-called "php developer" who was in charge of the website (btw full of security holes I discovered and dealed with when I first arrive at the job), and myself.
The database was a hell of 100+ tables of business and marketing data with a ton of specific logic added on-the-go during years. No consistent data model or naming. No utf8. Fucked up relations that ends with queries long enough to fill books. And that's not all, all the customers passwords was just stored there uncrypted. Several very big companies and administrations were some of these clients. I was insisting on the passwords point litterally all the time, that was an easy security fix and a good start... But no, in two years of discussions on the subject I never achieved to have them focusing on other considerations than "our customers like that we can remind them their password by a simple phone call if they lost it". What. The. Fuck. WHATTHEFUCK!
Eventually I ran myself out of this nightmare. I had a few bad jobs already, and worked on shitty software already. But that one really blows my mind (and motivation for a time too). Happy it's over.1 -
Dear fellow developers: Let's talk about the Internet. If you're reading this post, you've probably heard of it and are comfortable using it on a regular basis. You may even develop software that works over the internet, and that's fine and great! But you have to draw the line somewhere, and that line has been pushed farther and farther back as time goes on.
Let's talk about video games. The first game that really got me into FPSes was Team Fortress 2. Back in the day, it had a great community of casual and competitive groups alike, and there were hats! Underneath the hood was a massive number of servers. Some were officially hosted, some were run by independent communities. It had a built-in browser and central index where you could find every publically-available server and connect to it. You could even manually input connection details if that failed. In my opinion, this was a near-perfect combination of optimal user-experience and maximum freedom to run whatever the hell you wanted to. Even today, if Valve decided to stop hosting official servers, the smaller communities could still stay afloat. Fifteen years in the future, after all demand has died off, someone can still recover the server software and play a game with their kids.
Now, contrast that to a game like Overwatch. Also a very pivotal game in the FPS world, and much more modern, but what's the underlying difference in implementation? NO SUPPORT FOR SELF-HOSTED SERVERS. What does that mean when Blizzard decides to stop hosting its central servers? IT DIES. There will be no more multiplayer experience, not now, not ever. You will never be able to fully share this part of your history with future generations.
Another great example is the evolution of voice chat software. While I will agree that Discord revolutionized the market, it took away our freedom to run our own server on our own hardware. I used to run a Mumble server, now it has fallen out of use and I miss it so much.
Over time, client software has become more and more dependent on centrally-hosted services. Not many people will think about how this will impact the future usability of the product, and this will kill our code when it becomes legacy and the company decides to stop supporting it. We will have nothing to give to future generations; nobody will be able to run it in an emulator and fully re-experience it like we can do with older games and software.
This is one of the worst regressions of our time. Think about services like IRC, SMTP, SSH, even HTTP, how you're so easily able to connect to any server running those protocols and how the Internet would change if those were replaced with proprietary software that depended on a central service.
(Relevant talk (16:42): https://youtu.be/_e6BKJPnb5o?t=1002)6 -
Today, I say farewell to a piece of software that has shared my professional uprising as a dev, today I let go off an old friend, today i uninstall chrome, after nearly 12 years of dedication, hard work and pain staking performance issues from time to time, you went from the child star that fixed what was wrong with browsers back in 2008, and became the abusive man child that crashes my system when I open you now, so enough with your bullshit.
Today I transfer my things to Edge(chromium) and say farewell old friend, there's only so many BSOD's you can cause just by launching a new tab without hardware acceleration before I can not stand the sight of you anymore.
I wish you a good and stable life, but your creators obviously couldn't give a fuck anymore about being the "light weight and fast" browser you once were.9 -
Inspired by @NoMad. My philosophy is that technology is a means to and ends. We’re a tool oriented species. As it relates to software and hardware, they should be your means to achieve your ends without you needing to think. Think of riding a bicycle or driving a car. You aren’t particularly conscious of them - you just adjust input based on heuristics and reflex - while your doing the activity.
For a long time Software has been horrendously bad at this. There is almost always some setup involved; you need to front-load a plan to get to your ends. Funny enough we’re in the good days now. In the early days of GUI you did have to switch modes to achieve different things until input peripherals got better.
I’ve been using windows from 95 and to this day, though it’s gotten better it’s not trivial to setup an all in one printer and scan a document - just yesterday I had to walk my mother through it and she’s somewhat proficient. Also when things break it’s usually nightmare to fix, which is why fresh installing it periodically is s meme to this day. MS still goes to great lengths with their UI so that most people can still get most of their daily stuff done without a manual.
I started Linux in University when I was offered an intro course on the shell. I’ve been using it professionally ever since. While it’s good at making you feel powerful, it requires intricate knowledge to achieve most things. Things almost never go smoothly no matter how much practice you have, especially if you need to compile tools from source. It also has very little in the ways of safe guards to prevent you from hurting yourself. Sure you might be able to fix it if you press harder but it’s less stress to just fresh install. There is also nothing, NOTHING more frustrating than following documentation to the T and it just doesn’t work! It is my day job to help companies with exactly this. Can’t really give an honest impression of the GUI ux as the distros have varying schools of thoughts with their desktop environments. Even The popular one Ubuntu did weird things for a while. In my humble opinion, *nix is better at powering the internet than being a home computer your grandma can use.
Now after being in the thick of things, priorities change and you really just want to get things done. In 2015 I made the choice to go Mac. It has been one of my more interesting experiences. Honestly, I wish more distros would adopt its philosophy. Elementary only adopted the dock. It’s just so intuitive. How do you install an application? You tap the installer, a box will pop up then you drag the icon to the application folder (in the same box) boom you are done. No setup wizards. How to uninstall? Drag icon from app folder to trash can. Boom done. How to open your app? Tap launch pad and you see all your apps alphabetically just click the one you want. You can keep your frequent ones on the dock. Settings is just another app in launchpad and everything is well labeled. You can even use your printers scanner without digging through menus. You might have issues with finder if your used to windows though and the approach to maximizing and minimizing windows will also get you for a while.
When my Galaxy 4 died I gave iPhone a chance with the SE. I can tell you that for most use cases, there is no discernible difference between iOS and modern android outside of a few fringe features. What struck me though was the power of an ecosystem. My Mac and iPhone just work well together. If they are on the same network they just sync in the background - you need to opt in. My internet went down, my iMac saw that my iPhone had 4g and gave me the option to connect. One click your up. Similar process with s droid would be multi step. You have airdrop which just allows you to send files to another Apple device near you with a tap without you even caring what mechanism it’s using. After google bricked my onHub router I opted to get Apples airport series. They are mostly interchangeable and your Mac and iOS device have a native way to configure it without you needing to mess with connecting to it yourself and blah. Setup WiFi on one device, all your other Apple devices have it. Lots of other cool stuff happen as you add more Apple devices. My wife now as a MacBook, an IPad s d the IPhone 8. She’s been windows android her life but the transition has been sublime. With family sharing any software purchase works for all of us, and not just apples stuff like iCloud and music, everything.
Hate Apple all you want but they get the core tenet that technology should just work without you thinking. That’s why they are the most valued company in the world14 -
When you, being severely understaffed, ask your boss and the president of the company to hire another embedded dev and a technical QA to work with you at the minimum, with hard proof of the need, because you work alone on a project that was initially poorly designed even though it is the core business of the company and that it bottlenecks literally almost every other sphere of the company...
and instead, he propose you to find by yourself 4 offshore unpaid interns to help you develop an EMBEDDED SOFTWARE that requires specific EXPENSIVE HARDWARE to run and test...
because paying new employees or even an intern is too expensive even though we had record sales the last few months and that the government pays 50% of salaries until the pandemic is gone.
Fuck this shit I'm out! I'm tired of not being paid enough to fix other people's mistakes. Have fun with your failing business. Btw, this is all your fault.2 -
Me: "Omg, I'm so not sorry you didn't get a response to your 2:00am text sent to my private phone number about that super duper not important thing that a four year old could solve... but my girlfriend gave me a wrist band thingy that puts my phone on silent whenever it thinks I'm sleeping."
Product Owner: "And you can't set it up properly!? Your title says `señor software engineer` for god's sake!"
Me: "Yeah, it does. This is a hardware issue, though."
...is what I told her and she bought it. 🤷♂️2 -
@cozyplanes birthday is coming.....
And my dad is asking if I want some presents....
But I can't think of one.
I already have decent headphones and earphones, speaker, keyboard, mouse, laptop, monitor, phone, and tablet...
I personally don't need anything now, but I want to get something.
Can anyone recommend hardware stuff for me? (not software) Mostly tech related, but if you can think of music stuff or leisure stuff (like boosted board, even tho I don't have the time to ride it), that's great too!
Will waiting for you guys/gals suggestions.
P.S. Ofc I want to get my own A320 or A350, but I am pretty sure my dad can't afford it. If any of you guys/gals have the money, please contact me.14 -
This will definitely trigger many but the truth regardless of how you feel is the greatest programmers are those who understand both the hardware level and software .. only then are you more than a dev or programmer.. you are an engineer...
I challenge the devs who dis believe to go out and learn to build circuits, write optimized, efficient bare metal code.: no sdk.. no api... no drivers ..remove the unneeded abstraction layers that have blinded you...build it yourself, expand your potential and understanding..
Not only will you become more valuable overall, but you will write better code as you are more conscious of performance and space and physics of the physical layer.
I’m not talking about Arduino or raspie
Those who stand strong that high level abstraction languages and use of third party apis is a sufficient sustainable platform of development are blind to reality.. the more people who only know those levels, the less people pushing the industry of the low level.., which is the foundation of everything in the industry.. without that low level software the high level abstractions and systems cannot run
Why did we have huge technology advancements from 70s to early 2000s.... because more people in our industry understood the hardware layer..: wrote the software at the less abstracted layers..
Yeah it takes longer todo things at that low level abstraction.. but good robust products that change the world and industry don’t take a few week or months to build.....
Take this with what you will... I’m just trying to open the eyes of the blind developers to the true nature and reality of our industry23 -
Worst exp. with manager/higher-up?
Too many to pick the worst, but here are a few:
Manager demoted me because he believed I would be a roadblock to his wet dream of re-writing all the business services in WCF
https://youtube.com/watch/...
Manager spent years and wasted countless man hours retiring a single ASP.Net web service by converting the individual supporting assemblies into specific WCF services..
https://youtube.com/watch/...
Manager once berated me for 'missing' time log entries
https://youtube.com/watch/...
Manager scolded me for not fixing a 'bug' while praised another developer who re-wrote a reporting application due to a fixable hardware problem and deleting the source code files from source control.
https://youtube.com/watch/...
Manager wanted to rewrite all our code in XML.
https://youtube.com/watch/...
Manager wanted integration with a new phone system knowing the hardware+software did not exist yet ..
https://youtube.com/watch/...
Manager wanted me to 'take the lead' to speed up a web site in a foreign country we didn't control.
https://youtube.com/watch/... -
I did a project once and it came back to haunt me - this is how I got the job I have now:
I was already working for the company, in the second year of my vocational training as an electronics technician when I got a assigned The Project.
In brief, The Project was a kind of measurement automation implemented with some arduinos. I was tinkering with them at the time in my free time so they must've thought 'Hey, great, she can do that, so she can also do The Project!'
Just that I couldn't - after investing nearly a year, getting frustrated because of the lack of time, support, knowledge etc. The Project died quite unceremoniously and I resumed my training normally.
I just wish devRant already existed back then, it'd have made up for some spectacular rants - The Project was fucking nerve-wrecking due to incoherent behaviour by some hardware and I had to battle the whole big, ugly thing more or less alone as an apprentice.
If it hadn't died at the time it did I feel like I would've brutally murdered it with a shovel - that is, if someone actually would've cared enough to buy me a shovel.
But it ended and I let it go.
In the last year of completing this vocational training, my feeling of "This is not enough" and growing boredom with the routines of my future job had manifested. I wanted to go back to university but also continue working at the same time.
I wasn't ready to do freelancing nor did I want to quit at that time - most people there are amazing and I'm still learning much from them - so I asked early for a student position and got one.
And to get some continuity in my work, it wasn't just any student project I was assigned to but The Project. It came back alive, laughing at me, leaving bodies of dead electronics in its wake, after all these years.*
And that's how I got my current job.
*(They asked me if I was OK with it and they dropped the Arduinos and other hardware in exchange for a bit more software. Also I have a team of great engineers which I can ask for help anytime should I get stuck, so I got that going for me which is nice.) -
Long story short, my mama fixed the printer!
Well, more like she did troubleshoot.
Needed to print something and printer didn’t light up. Did some basic troubleshooting but didn’t work. So assumed it’s spoiled and thought would just use softcopy since document isn’t that important.
When papa told mama abt it, she went ahead and troubleshoot/setup for me to print. Even printed out a test doc, lol.
Then she remarked, “u’ve been doing software, that’s why not so good with hardware hah!”
Proud child is proud. 💪🏿2 -
Fuckin RAZER. Part 2. "SOLVED!!!"
This will be both a rant and a shout out.
Firslty, fuck RAZER. I don't who in the actual fuck makes the software for these peripherals, but while the hardware is decent the entire software team should be tarred and fucking feathered. Just beaten bloody with a rubber hose. And then publicly paraded and shamed through whatever backwater shithole they call home all while their mothers look on crying their eyes out.
Anyway, some of you may be familiar with my Razer peripherals on Mac saga.
To refresh your memories... I got 4 razer devices for my b-day from my wife. I was very stoked. They work great on Windows 10. They work for shit on Mac and the software to manage their colors, Synergy 3, is not available on Mac, and the version that is, Synergy 2, basically does not work and hasn't worked for like two years and would only work for two of these peripherals anyway and it would appear Razer does not give a shit. Fuck.
Ok, we caught up? Good.
In our last episode I ran up a full Windows 10 VM AND a full Debian VM just so I could jumpstart these god damn peripherals into a solid color.
Why so much work?
Because by default they rotate the color spectum fucking SEPARATELY... so it's just a god awful mess of rando RGB.
So, by running Synergy 3 on the Windows side, and then an open source package called Poloychromatic on the Debian side I was able to patch together preferences through the two programs... and I found quitting out of them hard kept the keyboard, mouse, mousemat, and dock color settings until the next reboot while working on my Mac.
For WEEKS I WENT THROUGH THIS FUCKING PROCESS AT EVERY REBOOT.
Reboot. Run up Windows 10 VM, update Synergy 3, log into Synergy 3, Open Synergy 3, Wait like 90 seconds, Synergy 3 finally fucking gets ahold of my mouse pad, mouse, and dock (not the keyboard).
Run up Debian VM (at least its fast), start polychromatic, set the keyboard solid color.
Then quit them both and my colors are set until reboot.. This is, for lack of a better turn of phrase, the most fucking ridiculous thing ever.
I had to do a 400 fucking megabyte update today for the Synergy 3 software that lives INSIDE my god damn VM. A VM only created in the first damn place to run synergy 3 and then fucking die. And it put me over the edge.
I committed to finding a better way this evening. I started looking into trying to port polychromatic to macOS my god damn self only to find this badass mother fucking kid Ken Chen wrote a whole god damn macOS package and put it up on GitHub.
Fuck fucking YEEEEEESSSS!!!
So thanks to Ken Chen, a student from Australia with 12 Github followers, who was single handedly able to write a better software product than the entire fucking team at SHIT FOR BRAINS fucking Razer.
https://github.com/1kc/razer-macos4 -
i hate linux like a lot , how do you guys use it
like you guys dont want an advertising ID, how the fuck will advertisers know who you are and what you like?
open source , give me a break, you mean your os devs are soo untrustworthy that you just have to see what they wrote in the code, who does that?
free come on, how poor are you linux people, i mean, quality stuff gets paid for, free stuff just means it's trash
and the linux devs , the aint like real coders they are just hobbysts, making your os in their free time
and who wants to install their own software anyway, on other platforms the company curates restricted software that you can use, and i know you'll say its oppressive but its just customer protection.
and i do want my platform to track everything i do, it only helps them build better stuff for me.
and whenever they decide to outdate my hardware and kill support for it, it only means they care and want me to get the latest tech, how considerate.
wait , i hear you say, there are no bugs in linux, my vendor makes sure my os comes with the latest antivirus software, nothing can break my system.
and just because linux runs on servers and most super computers only shows that common users like you and me are ignored, at least my vendor is not a sellout, and still makes stuff for the masses.
you say freedom i say safety i can sleep safe and sound for am protected nutured under one echosystem of software that i can not leave.20 -
Hey Chris can you join this conference call where we will talk about hardware and pricing options and not bring up anything software related.3
-
1. It's gonna be more and more specialized - to the point where we'll equal or even outdo the medical profession. Even today, you can put 100 techs/devs into a room and not find two doing the same job - that number will rise with the advent of even more new fields, languages and frameworks.
2. As most end users enjoy ignoring all security instructions, software and hardware will be locked down. This will be the disadvantage of developers, makers and hackers equally. The importance of social engineering means the platform development will focus on protecting the users from themselves, locking out legitimate tinkerers in the process.
3. With the EU getting into the backdoor game with eTLS (only 20 years after everyone else realized it's shit), informational security will reach an all-time low as criminals exploit the vulnerabilities that the standard will certainly have.
4. While good old-fashioned police work still applies to the internet, people will accept more and more mass surveillance as the voices of reason will be silenced. Devs will probably hear more and more about implementing these or joining the resistance.
5. We'll see major leaks, both as a consequence of mass-surveillance (done incompetently and thus, insecurely) and as activist retaliation.
6. As the political correctness morons continue invading our communities and projects, productivity will drop. A small group of more assertive devs will form - not pretty or presentable, but they - we - get shit done for the rest.
7. With IT becoming more and more public, pseudo-knowledge, FUD and sales bullshit will take over and, much like we're already seeing it in the financial sector, drown out any attempt of useful education. There will be a new silver-bullet, it will be useless. Like the rest. Stick to brass (as in IDS/IPS, Firewall, AV, Education), less expensive and more effective.
8. With the internet becoming a part of the real life without most people realizing it and/or acting accordingly, security issues will have more financial damages and potentially lethal consequences. We've already seen insulin pumps being hacked remotely and pacemakers' firmware being replaced without proper authentication. This will reach other areas.
9. After marijuana is legalized, dev productivity will either plummet or skyrocket. Or be entirely unaffected. Who cares, I'll roll the next one.
10. There will be new JS frameworks. The world will turn, it will rain.1 -
Hi devRant;
What’s your opinion on ‘open source’
Pros for and cons against its use. I’m curious
Reason for my question
I just met a programmer on the bus who is vehemently against open source starting he goes out of his way to not use anything ‘open source’
I myself use open source tools everyday in both my programming classes and outside projects. I vehemently believe the global collaboration potential of the open source concept is key to building bigger and better software and hardware in the future9 -
This MOTHERFUCKER was hiding from me for three FUCKING DAYS now! All the damn time I had corrupt display memory cause of it!
Context: CS and DC were accidentally swapped on the PCB! Not a hardware issue thou. The pins can be remapped in software.
7 -
We are so fucked up at our company:
While the support for our client hardware is running out, our operation departement has just found out that Windows 7 is no longer supported on new HW. Well, that for itself is not bad, but we have a really old tool for reporting our daily work. And because that mo*fu*ing piece of customized software still runs in 16bit mode, it will not run on Win 10 anymore.
Alternative solutions are too expensive, so I see that we will have to port that crap somehow from 1997 to 2017 ourself 😲 Replacing is not an option because there are a ton of Excel sheets connected to the database, even the company balance is made with that data (and also in Excel). At least it is our CEO which has built that crap. So he has to pay for his twenty year old sins!4 -
When Everybody Is Digging for Gold, It’s Good To Be in the Pick and Shovel Business
- ai is just another squeeze of money to cloud from our pockets, no matter what you do as long as you’re not selling/renting hardware or have high profit customers your product will die
I don’t believe in any ai product right now that can’t be self hosted and opensource and many of them are not.
I use mac, like 64GB m1 mac book pro so I can host load of things like llama, wizzard-lm, mistral, any yolo, whisper, gpt, fucking midjourney or other stable diffusion for me is no drama.
I’d say there is no consumer product for ai right now. OpenAI is scam given what we got from mistral.
We are very early in this new but old technology and my worries are that we are not there yet. We will need to wait for another iteration that is approximately 10 years to achieve what we have in mind because current hardware is 10 years behind software.
We don’t have an affordable computing power to go for our dreams.
Sad but true.5 -
Fucking MikTex.
Apparently this software got stuck somewhere back in the nineties. Got a fresh installation to make sure issues were not arising from outdated hardware - still connection errors, API errors, horrible, unresponsive and ugly UI, what a broken piece of ****.7 -
Aren't you, software engineer, ashamed of being employed by Apple? How can you work for a company that lives and shit on the heads of millions of fellow developers like a giant tech leech?
Assuming you can find a sounding excuse for yourself, pretending its market's fault and not your shitty greed that lets you work for a company with incredibly malicious product, sales, marketing and support policies, how can you not feel your coders-pride being melted under BILLIONS of complains for whatever shitty product you have delivered for them?
Be it a web service that runs on 1980 servers with still the same stack (cough cough itunesconnect, membercenter, bug tracker, etc etc etc etc) incompatible with vast majority of modern browsers around (google at least sticks a "beta" close to it for a few years, it could work for a few decades for you);
be it your historical incapacity to build web UI;
be it the complete lack of any resemblance of valid documentation and lets not even mention manuals (oh you say that the "status" variable is "the status of the object"? no shit sherlock, thank you and no, a wwdc video is not a manual, i don't wanna hear 3 hours of bullshit to know that stupid workaround to a stupid uikit api you designed) for any API you have developed;
be it the predatory tactics on smaller companies (yeah its capitalism baby, whatever) and bending 90 degrees with giants like Amazon;
be it the closeness (christ, even your bugtracker is closed and we had to come up with openradar to share problems that you would anyway ignore for decades);
be it a desktop ui api that is so old and unmaintained and so shitty, but so shitty, that you made that cancer of electron a de facto standard for mainstream software on macos;
be it a IDE that i am disgusted to even name, xcrap, that has literally millions of complains for the same millions of issues you dont even care to answer to or even less try to justify;
be it that you dont disclose your long term plans and then pretend us to production-test and workaround-fix your shitty non-production ready useless new OS features;
be it that a nervous breakdown on a stupid little guy on the other side of the planet that happens to have paid to you dozens of thousands of euros (in mandatory licences and hardware) to actually let you take an indecent cut out of his revenues cos there is no other choice in a monopoly regime, matter zero to you;
Assuming all of these and much more:
How can you sleep at night with all the screams of the devs you are exploiting whispering in you mind? Are all the money your earn worth?
** As someone already told you elsewhere, HAVE SOME FUCKING PRIDE, shitty people AND WRITE THE FUCKING DOCS AND FIX THE FUCKING BUGS you lazy motherfuckers, your are paid more than 99.99% of people on earth, move your fucking greasy little fingers on that fucking keyboard. **
PT2: why the fuck did you remove the ESC key from your shitty keyboards you fuckshits? is it cos autocomplete is slower than me searching the correct name of a function on stackoverflow and hence ESC key is useless? at least your hardware colleagues had the decency of admitting their error and rolling back some of the uncountable "questionable "hardware design choices (cough cough ...magic mouse... cough golden charging cables not compatible with your own devices.. cough )?12 -
Now I have a Course called "Microprocessor and Assembly Language" this semester. I'm not understanding much of it from the classes (I don't find our teacher very good at teaching). So couple of days ago she says we have to submit projects at the end of this semester and it must be something related to hardware, not software(as she thinks Assembly is a language for Hardware). Now I have to submit a proposal to her very soon with an idea for the project. I'm killing myself over it but can't find any idea. Can anyone help me regarding this matter?16
-
MENTORS - MY STORY (Part II)
The next mentor was my first boss at my previous job:
2.- Manager EA
So, I got new in the job, I had a previous experience in other company, but it was no good. I learned a lot about code, but almost nothing about the industry (project management, how to handle requirements, etc.) So in this new job all I knew was the code and the structure of the enterprise system they were using (which is why the hired me).
EA was BRILLIANT. This guy was the Manager at the IT department (Software Development, Technology and IT Support) and he was all over everything, not missing a beat on what was going on and the best part? He was not annoying, he knew how to handle teams, times, estimations, resources.
Did the team mess something up? He was the first in line taking the bullets.
Was the team being sieged by users? He was there attending them to avoid us being disturbed.
Did the team accomplished something good? He was behind, taking no credit and letting us be the stars.
If leadership was a sport this guy was Michael Jordan + Ronaldo Nazario, all in one.
He knew all the technical details of our systems, and our platforms (Server Architectures both software and hardware, network topology, languages being used, etc, etc). So I was SHOCKED when I learned he had no formation in IT or Computer Science. He was an economist, and walked his way up in the company, department from department until he got the job as IT Manager.
From that I learned that if you wanna do things right, all you need is the will of improving yourself and enough effort.
One of the first lessons he taught me: "Do your work in a way that you can go on holidays without anyone having to call you on the phone."
And for me those are words to live by. Up to that point I thought that if people needed to call me or needed me, I was important, and that lessons made me see I was completely wrong.
He also thought me this, which became my mantra ever since:
LEARN, TEACH AND DELEGATE.
Thank you master EA for your knowledge.
PART I: https://devrant.com/rants/1483428/...1 -
Sooooo... I've felt a bit lost during my years as a student and maybe this is a nice place to finally talk about it.
I've had my first programming experiences in school (back then it was delphi, a Pascal variant), then decided after graduating I want to study computer science. I've stuck with it and will finish my masters degree in a few months. (Took me a year longer than the university plans but will likely have a very good grade)
Since i have little programming experience and never coded anything useful (mostly study projects or simple programming tasks) I've always been struggling with depressions, worries of being not good enough and never finding a job etc pp, but in the last few months it got worse since I NEED to apply for jobs now as i graduate next may. I'd really like to improve and found some "learn how to code" websites but the progress seems still slow and meaningless when I compare myself to all those guys out there:
- those comparing several hardware/software pieces casually since they know all the (dis)advantages and specs off by heart
- those who have fierce discussions about languages, libraries, runtimes etc
- those who solve the problems in coding websites with 3 lines and incredibly mathematicsl proofs for why this shortcut works (fastest)
- basically the guys who discuss so many things i've never even heard of
I just feel so lost, useless and like i missed years of learning things everybody else just obviously knows now. Is there any way to catch up? I thought about trying to join a local Chaos Computer Club but they sound like they wouldn't be fond of a noob like me.6 -
HEYYY!!
Glad to see ya all, how have ya been?
Gosh, it has been forever since the last time! I feel like I forgot about this platform too much, it feels good to have a place full of wonderful people to speak to, and you don't see those everywhere. I'm sorry I haven't been here much, it was mostly due to me not being able to practice programming much and thus falling back on tech stuff.
BUT - that period is now over. Maybe.
I'm gonna be more active on here, in the past recent years I've seen how bad most social medias turned out to be, with a few very special exceptions. I think devRant deserves more activity, so for better or for worse (hopefully better), I'm back!
I think my biggest problem right now is the need for a better PC, one Italians would call "a PC with the controcazzi", lol. A good one, is what I'm sayin. But would ya look at that, thr moment I start searching up for one, a friggin pandemic takes place and prices skyrocket! Ain't that fun. XD
I would probably have found an awesome PC build by now if I knew jack shit about hardware, but unfortunately I was always more into software than hardware. ^^"
So if anybody has any idea, I mean, I'm open to suggestions~ they'd be very appreciated, and thanks in advance. <3
But enough about that - how are you holding up? I hope you're doing good.
Misadventures and bad stuff happen, but I promise you we're all gonna get out of it soon. In the meantime, always remember to drink water, eat properly, keep yourself sanitized, exercise, and do things you love doing. That's what life is about. I'm looking forward to hearing from y'all, once again. 💙
Keep fighting the good fight, and kick ass! And chew gum, too.2 -
I'd like to ask: What's trending at the moment instead....
Either I'm old and senile and missing something, or there is not really sth new.
Okay, JS might be crapping out new frameworks in their common "Not invented here" diarrhea....
But otherwise? What's really new?
I don't really know. I'm not only thinking about languages and stuff, but even in hardware there ain't really a big thing going on in my opinion.
Hab ich wat verpennt?
(Have I overslept?)
We had an interesting and frightening discussion regarding NGINX, as it is russian software today and that a new trend of a true, actively developed webserver is severely lacking... Apache looks semi dead and most other niche webservers, too.
That's all I've seen as a "trend" discussion in the latest time4 -
We basically don't unit test at work. I write some tests for my code and honest to God people complain I'm wasting time saying a test bed and manual tests are good enough. We don't write test beds for about half of our production code and rely on integration tests for the rest. We only test release builds which have been symbol stripped, I get handed a crash report with no stack trace that I'm unable to reproduce and expected to stay late to fix it for some arbitrary internal deadline.
I've since moved to R&D where basically I'm left to do my own thing so it's better.
We don't project manage. Project leads take time estimates and double them so management might cut them some slack. This doesn't matter because management made up time estimates before the project started. Last project I was on had a timeline of 3 months and took a year.
We have released broken products. Not that any of the above really matters, our software products have made about 50k revenue in 2 years. There are 6 people on software. Fortunately hardware has made about 3 mill. That said our hardware customers are getting frustrated with us as we keep fucking up, shipping broken products and missing deadlines.
I've been working there about a year and a half and will be looking for a job at the end of the current project.
I joined devRant about when I was most pissed off with my job, my rant frequency has definitely gone down since I moved over to R&D. -
(Warning: This rant includes nonsense, nightposting, unstructured thoughts, a dissenting opinion, and a purposeless, stupid joke in the beginning. Reader discretion is advised.)
honestly the whole "ARM solves every x86 problem!" thing doesn't seem to work out in my head:
- Not all ARM chips are the same, nor are they perfectly compatible with each other. This could lead to issues for consumers, for developers or both. There are toolchains that work with almost all of them... though endianness is still an issue, and you KNOW there's not gonna be an enforced standard. (These toolchains also don't do the best job on optimization.)
- ARM has a lot of interesting features. Not a lot of them have been rigorously checked for security, as they aren't as common as x86 CPUs. That's a nightmare on its own.
- ARM or Thumb? I can already see some large company is going to INSIST AND ENFORCE everything used internally to 100% be a specific mode for some bullshit reason. That's already not fun on a higher level, i.e. what software can be used for dev work, etc.
- Backwards compatibility. Most companies either over-embrace change and nothing is guaranteed to work at any given time, or become so set in their ways they're still pulling Amigas and 386 machines out of their teeth to this day. The latter seems to be a larger portion of companies from what I see when people have issues working with said company, so x86 carryover is going to be required that is both relatively flawless AND fairly fast, which isn't really doable.
- The awkward adjustment period. Dear fuck, if you thought early UEFI and GPT implementations were rough, how do you think changing the hardware model will go? We don't even have a standard for the new model yet! What will we keep? What will we replace? What ARM version will we use? All the hardware we use is so dependent on knowing exactly what other hardware will do that changing out the processor has a high likelihood of not being enough.
I'm just waiting for another clusterfuck of multiple non-standard branching sets of PCs to happen over this. I know it has a decent chance of happening, we can't follow standards very well even now, and it's been 30+ years since they were widely accepted.5 -
I am trying to reverse engineer a fingernail hardening device for rapid hardware prototyping (becoming some kind of hardware developer I guess)
Since it is a fucking mess (all cables are black) they've chosen a weird construct to operate microcontroller on 240Vac (seems to be possible and made in very low energy consuming devices) i do not find any datasheet for one of the used products. It would help a lot but no. And messing around with high voltage is no fun.
I'm unsure if this fits as a dev rant since most/all I've read so far are software-related.
9 -
When I was younger I had a decision to go into hardware or software. I chose software and have loved it.
Recentily I just spent 5 hours trying install a Linux distro on an old server. I made no progress.
I made the right decision. Hardware freaking sucks! You spend hours working on outdated pieces of crap and find that to fix your problem you need to sell you kidney to finance your project. Not to mention you have to wait for literally everything! It's like gradel builds everywhere! Want to install a new distro on your USB? Bam, 5min gone. Want to boot into bios and change one setting? BAM! more time wasted...
A note to the sysadmins out there: thank you. I love you. I am so happy you do this kind of work so I don't have to.3 -
Easy. I was in just 1, but i heard what they were all about. They happened weekly.
This boss mainly ran his hardware renting business. The software for that hardware was often optional, but they developed and sold that as a seperate company with almost the same name.
The guy had no idea what development meant. What it means to test. Everything he knew was hardware, and it just never really clicked. This means that bugs and non linear development cost for a feature were confusing to him to a point that when brought up or conflicting, he would look confused, and walk out the office without another word.
This guy would bust in, usually monday morning and call a "meeting"
They gather in the lunchroom as thats the only place everyone fit, and the guy would go on a 3 hour monologue on god knows what.
It was never positive and always full off complaints and idiotic ideas that the senior developer had to break down until as if talking to a big toddler, on why they do not work.
As a result everyones day started mizzerable, nothing got done. The software package was full of logic flaws. And everyone wanted to quit but didn't have the energy to invest in that.
During that internship 1 guy was fired. In the 2 months he was there he litterally did jack shit. And if he did anything it was the bare minimum, committed broken but compilable, and then wait for revision requests.
Yeah that place was a shitshow. I loved it, but never again. -
The project that we spent one freaking year on, researching, developing our own hardware and software just got cancelled and I ain't getting paid shit...
https://youtu.be/Dv3eduzcZxc
This is a fucking nightmare! All this motherfucking work for nothing! I think I am going to cry... I mean we still have all the hardware and stuff but we can't do anything with it because is was build for one fucking task and noone would probably buy it because how specific the task that it's made for is. I mean I technically only own the software... anyone interested in buying an Android app that connects to a sensor (that counts stuff) via BLE, processes data from the sensor and uploads it to a database? It can also upload new firmware to the sensor, set basically any parameter and get all kinds of telemetry from it... can't really say what does this sensor count or anything about the hardware (I am not sure if I am allowed to brcause I don't own it - I only got to work on the firmware and the app)3 -
Okay... I need to confess.
I actually like the idea of counting arrays from 1 like it is in some languages.
It makes code cleaner.
Think about it.
You would never need to subtract 1 from count/size/length or add 1 for things like the month in javascript because the first item would be at index 1 and many many errors wouldn't be happening because we don't need to force our minds to think another way. I learned counting from 1 after I learned to walk so it's the most natural thing to do. Just because the software/hardware below our language works that way doesn't mean we can not abstract this behavior away. What's your opinion about this? Am I wrong?12 -
Holy mother of butts. Two weeks. Two weeks I've been on and off trying to get hardware rendering to work in xorg on a laptop with an integrated nvidia hybrid gpu.
I know the workarounds and it's what I've been using otherwise. Nouveau without power management or forced software rendering works fine. I also know it's a known issue, this is just me going "but what the hell, it HAS to be possible".
The kicker is that using nvidias official tools will immediately break it and overwrite your xorg.conf with an invalid configuration.
I've never bought an nvidia gpu but all my work laptops have had them. Every time i set one up I can't resist giving this another shot, but I always hit a brick wall where everything is set up right but launching X produces a black screen where I can't even launch a new tty or kill the current one. I assume it's the power management tripping over itself.
The first time I tried getting this to work was about 3 or 4 years ago on a different laptop and distro. It's not a stretch to say that it would be better if nvidia just took down their drivers for now to save everyone's time.5 -
My path to software development was: Hardware Engineer, Helpdesk Analyst, self-taught Junior C# Developer...
Will not studying CS become a hinderance later in my career?14 -
To me this is one of the most interesting topics. I always dream about creating the perfect programming class (not aimed at absolute beginners though, in the end there should be some usable software artifact), because I had to teach myself at least half of the skills I need everyday.
The goal of the class, which has at least to be a semester long, is to be able to create industry-ready software projects with a distributed architecture (i.e. client-server).
The important thing is to have a central theme over the whole class. Which means you should go through the software lifecycle at least once.
Let's say the class consists of 10 Units à ~3 hours (with breaks ofc) and takes place once a week, because that is the absolute minimum time to enable the students to do their homework.
1. Project setup, explanation of the whole toolchain. Init repositories, create SSH keys for github/bitbucket, git crash course (provide a cheat sheet).
Create a hello world web app with $framework. Run the web server, let the students poke around with it. Let them push their projects to their repositories.
The remainder of the lesson is for Q&A, technical problems and so on.
Homework: Read the docs of $framework. Do some commits, just alter the HTML & CSS a bit, give them your personal touch.
For the homework, provide a $chat channel/forum/mailing list or whatever for questions where not only the the teacher should help, but also the students help each other.
2. Setup of CI/Build automation. This is one of the hardest parts for the teacher/uni because the university must provide the necessary hardware for it, which costs money. But the students faces when they see that a push to master automatically triggers a build and deploys it to the right place where they can reach it from the web is priceless.
This is one recurring point over the whole course, as there will be more software artifacts beside the web app, which need to be added to the build process. I do not want to go deeper here, whether you use Jenkins, or Travis or whatev and Ansible or Puppet or whatev for automation. You probably have some docker container set up for this, because this is a very tedious task for initial setup, probably way out of proportion. But in the end there needs to be a running web service for every student which they can reach over a personal URL. Depending on the students interest on the topic it may be also better to setup this already before the first class starts and only introduce them to all the concepts in a theory block and do some more coding in the second half.
Homework: Use $framework to extend your web app. Make it a bit more user interactive with buttons, forms or the like. As we still have no backend here, you can output to alert or something.
3. Create a minimal backend with $backendFramework. Only to have something which speaks with the frontend so you can create API calls going back and forth. Also create a DB, relational or not. Discuss DB schema/model and answer student questions.
Homework: Create a form which gets transformed into JSON and sent to the backend, backend stores the user information in the DB and should also provide a query to view the entry.
4. Introduce mobile apps. As it would probably too much to introduce them both to iOS and Android, something like React Native (or whatever the most popular platform-agnostic framework is then) may come in handy. Do the same as with the minimal web app and add the build artifacts to CI. Also talk about getting software to the app/play store (a common question) and signing apps.
Homework: Use the view API call from the backend to show the data on the mobile. Play around with the mobile project to display it in a nice way.
5. Introduction to refactoring (yes, really), if we are really talking about JS here, mention things like typescript, flow, elm, reason and everything with types which compiles to JS. Types make it so much easier to refactor growing codebases and imho everybody should use it.
Flowtype would make it probably easier to get gradually introduced in the already existing codebase (and it plays nice with react native) but I want to be abstract here, so that is just a suggestion (and 100% typed languages such as ELM or Reason have so much nicer errors).
Also discuss other helpful tools like linters, formatters.
Homework: Introduce types to all your API calls and some important functions.
6. Introduction to (unit) tests. Similar as above.
Homework: Write a unit test for your form.
(TBC)4 -
I give software support to Rugged handhelds in a company and everyday some IT support moron comes to me with a crazy request. The day just started and...
IT Tech: "Hello, C, can you improve the touchscreen sensibility? It's not so responsive and sometimes we have to click more than one time to something work"
**breath in**
Me: "That's ok, the rugged ones that you have are very old, besides they have resistive screen, so your fingers won't do a good job"
IT Tech: "THERE'S NO WAY TO FIX IT? I guess I'll open a ticket for you to study more calmly about the issue"
**NGGGGGGGGGHHHH**
Me: "If it's not a software thing, I can't do that, I don't have hardware skills, I guess you'll have to call our provider about that, but, before you do something, try to recalibrate your handhelds, the majority of the users don't do that at the system's start and the touch experience really can become a mess"
IT Tech: "Hmmm, I'll try that, otherwise I'll back to you, thanks!"
OMFGGGGG
I am open to suggestions of a magic batch file/ .NET CF 2.0 software that will turn their handhelds into a Galaxy S6 touch experience. THANKS!1 -
Part of the problem, So many dev's here know the real problem with OS's governments and 3ed party apps happly spying on you and making there EULA to so called make it right for them to do it.
I want to know why so many dev's are portending this is not happen or why they not caring, you become part of the problem if your willing to work with the problem and there rules and guide lines.
WE dictate the future of tech not one company or another the people that create the software are the ones can make a difference, the users need to be educated and the dev need to take action now.
I loved this site at first but now I hate it I really do as so many posts are just blind or follow evil companies/software so on this is not how it should be, I wont accept this bull shit anymore and I not going to say quite to show the mass I going to follow them.
Step up and do something about it or stop calling yourself's dev's your part of the problem, you have the a gift and know how to help everyone do it and prove your worth.
I am really sorry I know some here do research and try and help but I rarely seeing it at the moment, things need to change, its not going to be easy but only the dev's can change this and soon, soon all OS's/software companies will get the feeling governments are on there side and governments what this so they have a back door in to WHO you are. FK the or if you have nothing to hide, EVERYONE has something to hide, compaines have already used Facebook Data to fire people working for them as they feel they shouldn't have to have someone working for them who likes or does XYZ,
Open your eyes people, small time dev's are not really included in this but big time dev's that do know how to work around these problems should be working on this to stop these problems, hardware venders are also a big problem but that's not something we can do anything about yet.
I know this rant will go on death ears to some, others will think I am over the top nut but if you really want to make a differences let's here it, lets get this world back on track, its not going to be easy but it we can do it.28 -
!rant
I was propably 15 years old the first time i saw my friend coding html and and other related stuff i cannot remember! It intriqued me and i really wanted to learn it (i wanted to learn to hack.. xD..) but at the given time i wasn't happy in life and i was pretty much addicted to WoW..
So.. forward 12 years, where i had gone to the military, thought about becoming a physiotherapist, psychiatrist, korean translator and game designer.. oh and countless attempts from another friend to get me interested in c#.. i decided to start studying computers (software/hardware) at DTU (danish university).
That was rougly 8-9 months ago and i am now pretty decent in C, HTML, C++, Java, MySQL and koncepts about networks and OOP designs :).
I am super grateful to all the trial and errors throughout my life that have brought me to this place :)
Still 27, still has alot to learn, but i am really happy where i am right now. Even so, that i am spending my free time making my own projects :)
I also get super happy whenever i fix a bug of mine :p.
I truly believe that you will skyrocket to succes if you do what you love.
For me, i just discovered that part of myself a little late :)
Not sure what i hope to achieve with this post, but i hope it can give an insight into what people go through and yeah.. go for what you want!
Have a great time everyone!
And first !rant on this app!
I love all your rants! vs !rants4 -
do you guys have problem with not receiving the proper tools for work where you live? here in brazil it seems like a given that companies won't provide good software and hardware for workers6
-
!rant
I find IT to be an amazing field. There are so many parts to it that take tremendous dedication to fully understand, yet, each part works together.
Teams of people dedicated their entire life to software development, which would be impossible if teams of people did not dedicated their entire life to the development of operating systems. That would be impossible if teams of people did not dedicated their entire life to integrating hardware and software. That again would be impossible if teams of people did not dedicated their entire life to electrical engineering.
I know I missed tons of subfields that link everything together, but just the massive amount of dedication and teamwork to make something as simple as a console application work properly is amazing. I wish I could understand it all and I hope everything will always be as easily accessible my entire life as it is now.2 -
Not a whole lot. But when I was 9 I started trying to fix an old Compaq computer that my parents replaced. I never actually got it to work but I did tear it apart and put it back together. Eventually a friend's parent gave me a a Dell that didn't work. Figured out it just needed a new HDD. Around that time my dad (who is literally the textbook definition of technically challenged) got a old textbook about computer hardware from a friend of his that was a bit of a hobbyist. This was in maybe 2006. The book was from 1988. I don't remember the name but it's somewhere in my parents house still. I didn't get much out of the book. Time passed and I started building computers. For myself, the local library, my friends. I ended up going to college for business while building computers on the side. I was making pretty good money for the amount of time I put into it. Eventually I ended up switching careers. My parents didn't really help me get into software but they offered encouragement. And a book from 1988 about computer hardware... So that's something.
-
Ok I'm going to jump in on the new iPhone shit, yes they are expensive, yes they are pale in comparison to flagship android devices (no I'm not an apple fan at all but I like Mac) but you don't buy an iPhone for the hardware, you buy it for the software and custom silicon.
iPhones will probably out perform android in synthetic tests for ever, they are working with custom designed hardware, custom software where as android will run on a multitude. Can't have 1 size fits all without compromise.
I will still say that iPhones are 110% to the power of 100 not worth the money in any way, but I'm sick and tired of seeing people compare iPhone to android when it's like comparing apples to oranges -,-3 -
Tl;dr Why would someone preconfigure a hardware raid on a server AND NOT TELL ME?
Recently we got a refurbished server that has some nice specs and works quite well. It had six 2.5 bays and came with two 248gb HDDs. But it only included 2 rails, so we needed more, and we got more.
I installed windows on it (yes, some of the software we use is windows only), and for some odd reason the forth HDD (this was the second one that was pre shipped) wouldn't show up in the disk management, which was odd especially considering the fact that the SAS did detect it, and would get pissed at me if I took it out. I was in a rush so I left it alone for then.
I had needed to setup a raid for these, and while I was trying to figure out what was wrong, I noticed that windows can do a software raid so I set it up on the third HDD (which is the first pre included HDD). I haven't actually used it yet.
At some point I stated to mess with the HDD that wasn't showing up (switching them around, etc.), when I noticed that windows saw the raid was setup on both of the HDDs, which made me wonder what was going on.
So I decided to check the SAS to see if there was something wrong there, as it was booting, bios let me know that there was a raid that was in the process of rebuilding, so then I thought "oh cool, windows actually does a hardware raid!" Well actually it doesn't, as I was looking I saw that this raid was only setup on the two HDDs that were acting funny, and therefore it was only coming up as one device in windows. I wasted an hour trying to find that! -
So basically I am the computer guy in my office. If there is any hardware or software related problem, I am the guy who fix it or try to fix it in my own time.
Little bit of more backstory. Two month ago we got react native project from a client. My boss asked me if I want to do that project. he knew that I don't know react native but I want to learn it. So I said yes. I have worked over 12 hours per day to work on that project while learning react native ( I committed the final version to git today.)
Yesterday there was a meeting in our office about project deadlines and issue with current work and stuff. In that meeting one guy asked (this guy had personal beef with me) in rude way like why I am taking parts of pc and given other people. ( If there is any hardware issue, I use other parts from pc which are not currently in use. So basically a simpe resource allocation.)
I knew it was a targeted questio toward me but before I say anything, All people took his side. (I did all those repair after taking permission from my boss, so he did not take that question seriously.)
I spend lots of time fixing those problem so people work does not stop and this is the thank you I got in return. I did this over one and half year. Right now I am asking my self if I continue the work or not.
Note: I wrote this whole thing to get my anger out of me. Sorry for typos. I am little bit drunk and I am not good with English.2 -
Acer vs MSI Laptops.
Five years ago I bought an acer aspire vn7-591 laptop in Redcoon. It was the expensive laptop I bought ever in those days. My experience at the beginning was really bad because the battery laptop crashed after few months and the screen had some vague/dead pixels, but the worst was the imminent bankruptcy of Redcoon. So I couldn't use the warranty. Anyway, It didn't bother so much I have been enjoying this laptop and still doing it. However, last year the screen put me on alert since it started to fail with vertical bars and color changes.
It was time to buy a new computer and due to the problems with some of the components, I've decided to buy a laptop from a company with a better reputation than Acer in aspects as the reliability of the components.
My choice was a Msi Prestige 15 because of the thunderbolts, since the rest of specs are 'more or less similar', although it has more updated hardware, it is lighter, battery holds up to 4-5 hours etc... But... It is really noisy compared to my Acer computer. 2 CPU fans are around 3000 rpm in idle state... Acer seems to be working without using the fans if you are doing intensive work. I google it as I thought it was a factory problem, but it seems to be not a malfunctioning... In fact I found other users complaining about the same and the community proposed to reduce the fan speed through software.
Right now I have both laptops working and since the new boy is in house, Acer is working flawlessly. I am preparing the Acer for my girlfriend as a gift, otherwise it is a pitty to shut it down and store it in a wardrobe.
So, this is my impression about ACER and MSI. I m still experiencing with the new laptop, but I find weird things like the fan speed or how hot it gets in idle despite it uses a new generation of intel i7 cpu with lower consumption... I should monitor the power consumption...8 -
I am on a forum that is mainly professional developers. The forum is specific to one library that is owned by the company that runs the forum. The participants are mainly volunteers as the project is open source. Most of the time it is great place to exchange experiences and help new comers to the library. However lately there has been a rash of shit posts about needing help with shit unrelated to the library.
I get it on some level, but come on people try to understand what the forum is about first. Don't bring your OS and hardware issues that have nothing to do with the library. Also, go fucking read the GPL/LGPL and any other license you have questions about. Seriously, if you want to be a developer you need to at least have an idea of what you can and cannot do. Software is an IP field. Learn what IP is and the rules to follow.
I was feeling like a jerk yesterday and started giving bogus answers to obviously unrelated questions. I know, not very pro like, but come on people! The guy was asking about monitor resolutions and changes since he updated his window manager. It was his first post on the forum. He was kind of sassy too. At least my state of mind at the time interpreted it that way...1 -
First and foremost, students should be carefully taught the logic and mentality behind programming. Most of the time I see that the introductory programming courses waste so much energy in teaching the language itself. So students kinda just get fucked cause many people end up ending the course without having actually gained the "programming perspective".
Stop teaching pointers and lambdas and even leave the object oriented stiff till later. If a student doesn't know why we use a For loop then how can they learn anything else.
I believe once that thing in your brain clicks about programming, everything goes smooth from there... kinda :P
Second of all, and this pertains mainly to the engineering and science disciplines.
We need a fundamental and strong mathematical foundation. And no I don't mean taking fucking double integrals. Teach us Linear Algebra, Graph theory, the properties of matrices, and Probability theory.
One of the things I suffered from most and regret in university is having a weak foundation in math and having to spend more time catching myself up to speed.
It's so annoying reading a paper on a new algorithm or method and feeling like an idiot because I can't understand what magic these people did.
Numerical Methods...
Ok this is more deeper, maybe a 2nd year course.
But this is something we take for granted.
Computers don't magically add and subtract and multiply.
They fuck up.
And it'll bite you in the ass if you're not even aware that the computer we all love so much isn't as perfect as we think
Some hardware knowledge.
Probably a basic embedded systems course with arduinos
just so you can get a feel for how our beautiful software actually makes those electrons go weeeeeeeee
And finally
Practice practice
Projects projects
like honestly
just give me the internet and some projects
Ill learn everything else
Projects are the best motivation
I hate this purely theoretical approach
where we memorize or read code and write these stupid exams
Test what we are capable off
make us do projects that take sleepless nights and litres of coffee
And judge our methods, documentation, team work, and output
Team work skills and tools (VCS, communicating, project management, etc.)
Documentation and Reporting
Properly
:)
maybe even with LaTeX :D
Yeah that's the gist of whats on my mind at the moment regarding an ideal computer science education
At least the foundations
The rest I leave it to the next dude. -
What's with so many developers using shitty hardware? It's literary the one tool you need for your profession, there should be absolutely no objection to having the best one available. Stop bitching about some software using 50% of your CPU when you're on the bare entry-level HW ffs! And don't give me that "can't afford it" bullshit. If you take your car to the repair shop, you're also paying for the tools needed for the job; the same way, your customers need to pay for the tools you need as a developer. If you can't afford that, there's clearly not enough demand for the work you do, so go find a different job.11
-
My favourite bug fix was actually IT based and it was the first time my Eastern European, critical of my skills, family not only praised me but claimed that I was smarter than them.
My grandfather had changed from a telecom to a VOIP device for his landline. For some reason after installation, he could hear the other person on the line but they couldn't hear him. Me and my mother were away during this time so they called in the other family IT guy. This guy is no joke, he's one of the top in his company and makes a sweet six figures and lives in a mansion.
So he started looking things up, googling forum, etc. Couldn't find anything. Started calling the tech support and tried to deduce what it was and their tech support had never heard of such a problem. He takes his lunch breaks to help out my gramps. Keeps escalating, escalating and nothing. His conclusion is that they need to send him a new VoIP stick and they're not giving it to him. At this point, he's so frustrated that he screams at my grandfather to go back to paying 60 bucks a month for landline and to stop bothering him.
At this time me and my mother return and they have concluded that they need a new stick. My mom is great at intimidating people into free stuff so she and I go over to do so. At this point everyone is convinced of the problem and even I don't think I could fix it. But I decide to check if that's the case because I don't want my gramps to get a new stick and it still doesn't work.
I go through the typical forum hunting and there's Nada on the problem. I look at the stick and all the lights seem to be working, no error lights. And I wonder maybe the problem is not the stick, because usually you can't do anything at all if the hardware is broken. So I start thinking, maybe my gramps accidentally muted his handset while talking or something dumb like that. That wasn't it.
Then I decided to see if the problem was recreated on the other handsets. I tried one out and my mom could hear me but I couldn't hear her. What?! That's different! It was the opposite with the other phone. I conclude that it's working and there's something up with the handsets. So I go and do a reset on all of the handsets to make sure.
Lo and behold, the problem is fixed. It took me 25 minutes to solve. That guy gave up after a week of trying. My mom who assumed my IT skills were on par with other kids and nothing special had finally seen me up against an opponent, and not any opponent, a six figure high ranking IT specialist. And I didn't even use any secret, complex software knowledge that wasn't accessible to her or any other normal user.
That's when she finally said that I was smarter than her, that I just used my common sense. She would've needed some kind of prompting, hint or direction to solve the issue but I did it without any.
It was a very satisfying bug to fix. -
Since day 0, I have been fond of computers. One of my first plush was called "DataDog" and looked like a CRT screen with dog ears around. According to my mum I was "addicted" to it.
At year 2, my dad was arranging some music on some software while I was watching him on his lap. Quick jump to the present: nowadays and since 10 years I run my own home studio with three guitars, two keyboards, one bass, three monitors, a microphone, an amp and a cabinet... coincidence? I think not!
Fast forward 5 years later (so I'm 6-7 years old), and I was playing with the legendary pinball game on Win95, as well as Flight Simulator. Then I was hogging mum's laptop to play settlers II (<3 that game), I eventually got my computer, and got into Quake III Arena being aged 10 (and had to tell my mum that game was safe for my age haha - I eventually removed the blood effects).
The Quake 3 Arena chapter is interesting: it got me into router configuration as I wanted to open a port through the router to host my own dedicated games with friends, it got me into DNS configuration (I was running a no-DNS client that allowed friends to join me through a DNS while having a dynamic IP) and eventually... to modifying .cfg files to tune my server as I wanted it. No programming here but a nice intro into :)
Then I hated the fact everybody would point their finger at me and say "geek" - I was only 13, fragile, sensitive, and I wanted everything but a bad image on me.
Meanwhile I continued on getting interested in hardware and configure my own computers, and investing myself into music production.
Then, university. "What do you want to study?" I thought of everything but IT, fleeing the image of a "geek". Turns out it was a waste of time, and at 21 yo I got into web development (well, just html and css), then learned a bit of PHP, finally got a specialized 2-year training and now here I am!
I was bound to be in IT either way since day 0, and funny fact, I've used every windows edition since Win95. -
What's the point of doing estimates per quarter if you are gonna change the estimates to projects that are being worked on to match the release date?
Also doing estimates per quarter before doing investigations on the requirements is a fucking shit way to do estimates. Arguably doing it per quarter is also trash.
We are not doing hardware design for fuck sake, we work on software, you bunch of retards.4 -
Was watching the Google live event. Must confess that I'm highly disappointed with the looks of the Pixel 2 . I guess 2017 is just not the year for Google! I mean I love the software improvements but let's admit it that inspite of us being software devs , we ourselves love good design! The pixel 2 just does not make the cut according to me. It looks like a brick. Google does need some hardware devs!10
-
I'm calling you out, Asus, fix your absolutely shitty piece of software or I'm never buying a motherboard from you again.
A little explanation: my PC woke up from sleep like this. On another occasion before I could take the screenshot, the CPU was sitting almost idle at 45 degrees C. The CPU fan senses that it has to spin up, but never actually does so.
I've had the opposite thing before - a case fan spinning up not wanting to spin down even if the temps are fine - which is preferable because it only causes a little bit of noise. But this here could potentially cause damage to the CPU if I put some load on it without looking at the temperature. I've partly remedied the issue by writing a batch script that kills and resets the fan control service and is triggered by Task Scheduler on resume from sleep - a thing every average Joe should do, right?
It's a shame for top-notch hardware to have to go together with such crappy piece of software. This is the X99 Sabertooth that cost me 450 EUR originally.
15 -
A certain company:
1) Forbids to run its proprietary operating system on hardware that is not produced by the company itself (BTW sold extremely overpriced). Virtual machines included.
2) Makes laptops with wrong and unusable keyboard layouts.
3) Does not sell any kind of servers that can be mounted on a rack.
Why should any open source project waste resources and time to support it? They should just be left alone with their crappy software and their overpriced hardware.4 -
have some ideas but only ones that i consider startup material are not software but hardware based!1
-
I used to be an iPhone user since iPhone 3, every year switching to the new model, always complaining about limitations and jailbreaking it with the concerns this brings up to the table, anyway, I also tried other cellphones like Samsung Galaxy XXX, worse shit ever, and those annoying Samsung apps you cannot uninstall, pfff, worst of the worst.
I started with pure Android phones some years ago, first with pixel 2, holly shit, software is amazing, I was amazed an happy with my phone, "infinite cloud storage for free" yes please!!!
The problem comes after 5 months of use, battery drains in less than 3 hours, even with the cellphone screen off and not using it, it was under warranty and got a new battery for free, well, no that bad. Suddenly the apps start blocking each other and takes a lot to open or switch between apps. I bought also the famous PIXEL BUDS, worst purchase ever, you never know if they are charging or still connected, no matter how hard do you try, it randomly connects, I tried all the possible solutions, didn't work, one random day, the buds went off, got new ones thanks to the warranty, now they are starting to fail again.
Bought the pixel 3, same exact shit as before, same errors, same shitty hardware, battery drains in hours, and I am a regular user, I do not have games or use it in an intensive way.
Conclusion:
- Google: Shitty hardware, great software, no limitations(I can send you one of my songs through Whatsapp and copy anything form my computer as a file), but god, why your hardware is so bad?
Also, a lot of free apps, but very bad designed, just look for any app to listen podcasts, you have to waste 10secs every fucking time to listen your shit, freedom comes with a price no doubt.
- Samsung: I have no idea who want that shit and why, , not satisfaction at all
- Apple: Fucking expensive, have to pay for everything, but quality is much better, hardware is flawless, I have to admit it, my GF has a freaking iPhone 7 and her phone is fine the whole day, on the downside, well, costs and limitations relative to sharing and use
So, I will switch again to fucking Apple, best of the 3 bad evils14 -
Electronic companies nowadays are no different than ranchers that force their slaves to earn money to buy new stuff cause people can’t repair old electronics or fix software bugs cause it’s not theirs or it’s not maintained and source code is not existent.
Damn you software and hardware corporations.
You tell everyone that you care about environment, yet you don’t fucking support your software and hardware as long as people use it. When you stop support you don’t make everything open source but keep it on your private repositories as intellectual property and fuck your clients.
Literally all electronics and software should be mandatory made open source to the people who purchased product so they can use it as long as they want not as long as corporate assholes want. This is insane law that is splitting our world and making it burn. If I could fix my laptop in nearby shop I wouldn’t have to purchase new one.
If it won’t change we will end up with <10 corporations that would rule world economy, everyone who will work for those corporations will be rich and happy and everyone else will be poor and unhappy . Mind me if this is not already happening and this planet slowly becomes Elysium movie nightmare.
Stop buying new stuff you stupid people cause this make things worse.
If it won’t change in 10 or so years there will be connected to cloud robots all over the world guarding us and some dick shit rich John Conor kid will hack them to exterminate humans by executing order 66. After that there will be big power outage that will put us into the role of battery and we would be closed in the barrel full of pink shit connected to matrix.
Get me out of here you asshole.1 -
So I ran into a perplexing "issue" today at work and I'm hoping some of you here have had experience with this. I got a story-time from my coworker about the early days of my company's product that I work on and heard about why I was running into so much code that appeared to be written hastily (cause it was). Turns out during the hardware bring-up phase, they were moving so fast they had to turn on all sorts of low level drivers and get them working in the system within a matter of days, just to keep up with the hardware team. Now keep in mind, these aren't "trivial" peripherals like a UART. Apparently the Ethernet driver had a grand total of a week to go from nothing to something communicating. Now, I'm a completely self-taught embedded systems focused software engineer and got to where I am simply cause I freaking love embedded systems. It's the best. BUT, the path I took involved focusing on quality over quantity, simply because I learned very quickly that if I did not take the time to think about what I was doing, I would screw myself over. My entire motto in life is something to the effect of "If I'm going to do it, I'm going to do it to the best of my abilities." As such, I tend to be one of the more forward thinking engineers on my team despite relative to my very small amount of professional experience (essentially I screwed myself over on my projects waaaay too often in the past years and learned from it). But what I learned today slightly terrifies me and took me aback. I know full well that there is going to come a point in my career where I do not have the time to produce quality code and really think about what I am designing....and yet it STILL has to work. I'm even in the aerospace field where safety is critical! I had not even considered that to be a possibility. Ideally I would like to prepare now so that I can be effective when that time does come...Have any of you been on the other side of this? What was it like? How can I grow now to be better prepared and provide value to my company when those situations come about? I know this is going to be extremely uncomfortable for me, but c'est la vie.
TLDR: I'm personally driven to produce quality code, but heard a horror story today about having to produce tons of safety-critical code in a short time without time for design. Ensue existential crisis. Help! Suggestions for growth?!
Edit: Just so I'm clear, the code base is good. We do extensive testing (for lots of reasons), but it just wasn't up to my "personal standards".2 -
What tools do you have access to at work?
I don't work a tech company, far from it. I love it but both the hardware and software at my disposal are so shitty I'm starting to lose it.
Running Windows locally, I'm not allowed any Linux distro because "security." Indeed, I don't even have admin rights on my machine. It was rejected. The excuse being that I am sudoer on a server, which (and can only be) physically located in our headquarters.
Today I found out this server's CPU from the dark ages does not support tensorflow, so here I will be building that shit from source tomorrow (no GPU of course).
And thanks for 4G of RAM on what you refer to as a "power" machine.3 -
Dude in my Calc 2 class just bitched about iPhones having "shitty software" referencing that bug from around ~6 years ago, when a specific iMessage text would reboot your phone. IMO, 99% of what Apple does well is software. UI is subjective, but final cut pro is unbelievable in terms of functionality for its price, their software is so well optimized that iPhones have been able to use comparably tiny batteries and still compete. They are consistent throughout their company with software design, while companies like Google are so stratified it took years before their material design had been implemented in all their services, there are still a few that aren't (not to mention the meme of Google killing off all their projects). I hate tablets, but the iPad pro has the best software/hardware implementation of any I've ever seen. Apple's interconnectivity between devices is unbelievable, whether it's Continuity features or the setup process just recognizing group devices around and pulling data to create consistent account info and saving you taps. Siri is shit, but apart from that their software isn't bad enough that you should complain about that instead of...
Their Macs are fucking pressure-cookers, and their fuckin marketing department is like a different company all-together, and their anti-fix-it-yourself policies are so user hostile that they're toe-to-toe with being as abusive to customers as Oracle.
TL;DR the biggest scam Apple has pulled off is not that the sheep still think Android and PC users are living in 2010, but they've convinced the sheep that they know what shitty software is. At that point they're too many levels deep and there is no red-pill strong enough for them.2 -
Our systems lead is trying to tell our software person how much adding unit tests would cost. It also sounds like he wants TDD to be added in after the fact. And he's bitching because the software guy won't move forward with it until we get it with the customer. He also wants all of them automated, but doesn't want to accept that that is going to cost a lot. Like a lot, a lot. This is a guy who doesn't know algorithms (had to explain dykstra to him), doesn't understand the tech stack we are using (I had to explain .net versions, the JIT compiler, and garbage collection to him), and seems not to understand hardware (I had to explain floating point math to him), yet he feels qualified to tell us how long it is going to take us to implement automated unit tests for major, complex features.
-
Least favorite enterprise software (so far) is Oracle JD Edwards (but more specifically the integration between systems).
Unfortunately a board member was friends with an employee who recommended JDE. It required full time maintenance and a few years later that employee left and the company wrote off over a million dollars to go back to the old (but slightly updated) system.
Following that, a board member (the same one I think) agreed to have another friend's security business install CCTV across the branches. The project was not scoped and no thought had gone into it, making a real mess for the IT department to sort out (provided hardware was under spec'd, existing networking equipment needed replacing, etc)
Who do these upper management people think they are that they can make decisions based on little fact or research and expect the people beneath them to just magically make work.
The huge salaries of those people is not justified. We're the real workers who actually get stuff done so the pay and appreciation should be spread accordingy.
Rant over. -
I started reading this rant ( https://devrant.com/rants/2449971/... ) by @ddit because when I started reading it I could relate to it, but the further he explained, the lesser relatable it got.
( I started typing this as a comment and now I'm posting this as a rant because I have a very big opinion that wouldn't fit into the character limit for a comment )
I've been thinking about the same problem myself recently but I have very different opinion from yours.
I'm a hard-core linux fan boy - GUI or no GUI ( my opinion might be biased to some extent ). Windows is just shit! It's useless for anything. It's for n00bs. And it's only recently that it even started getting close to power usage.
Windows is good at gaming only because it was the first platform to support gaming outside of video game consoles. Just like it got all of the share of 'computer' viruses ( seesh, you have to be explicit about viruses these days ) because it was the most widely used OS. I think if MacOS invested enough in it, it could easily outperform Windows in terms of gaming performance. They've got both the hardware and the software under their control. It's just that they prefer to focus on 'professionals' rather than gamers.
I agree that the linux GUI world is not that great ( but I think it's slowly getting better ). The non-GUI world compensates for that limitation.
I'm a terminal freak. I use the TTY ( console mode, not a VTE ) even when I have a GUI running ( only for web browsing because TUI browsers can't handle javascript well and we all know what the web is made of today - no more hacking with CSS to do your bidding )
I've been thinking of getting a Mac to do all the basic things that you'd want to do on the internet.
My list :
linux - everything ( hacking power user style )
macOS - normal use ( browsing, streaming, social media, etc )
windows - none actually, but I'll give in for gaming because most games are only supported on Windows.
Phew, I needed another 750-1500 characters to finish my reply.16 -
Steven He is hilarious. I just watched this off-brand video he did about game systems and video games:
https://youtube.com/watch/...
It got me wondering if we have off-brand software and hardware in the PC/Laptop/Server world. I don't know anymore because the stuff I see on sale for peripherals and cables can be really sketchy. I tried buying a decent USB3 hub and could not find a good one a few years back. It was a frustrating experience. Still don't have a good hub. I just gave up.2 -
How on earth is there any "sane" software (eco-)system or will it always be so crazy because as pieter hintjens might have said all this soft- and hardware is created by this social animal called human, with all it's faults and aberrations...
So it was just, that I could not print - probably because of this bug: https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/... - couldn't install a newer ghostscript. So I would scp my files inside an Ubuntu-VM from which I could print. Sometimes I could pdf2ps some files or transfer back the ps-file and print on my host machine, but mostly not... U n t i l today when I installed the fucking debug symbols package for ghostscript and I could just fucking print. Heisenbug, ghost error or what?1 -
!rant !dev
So, following up my last rant.
https://devrant.com/rants/2433162
I quit on Friday, this is what I said to my bosses.
"In the last week I had, 2 panic attacks, and I have 2 theories for this, one is that I have underlying psychological problems, the other theory is that we are under an impossible task, I choose to say now that I have to quit because I have psychological issues, but if you are willing to hear my other theory, that involves saying that meeting the deadline is not viable, then I can tell you that, so do want to listen that part?.
Bosses: No, we heard enough, we are going to have your contract terminated in order, and we will let you know when you can come and pick your paycheck."
So, that's them. Now about me and how I re-discovered GTD, or more precisely how I organized my whole weekend using taskwarrior with GTD, and why I think is going to be useful as a freelancer.
Before I feel good about telling you about my weekend I have to tell you a few things about myself.
I am a very impulsive person, I have a lot of energy in short surges, so I have to be able to maximize my activity when I'm in a surge, and I have to maximize my rest when I am not.
That's hard to do, it requires a balanced lifestyle, I am also very prone to being neurotic, and overwhelmed by the amount of stuff that I want to do.
And on top of that, when I am resting, I have surges of things that I want to have, do, or implement, it could be software related, as "Doing an app that will be the Uber of home services", to house improvements like, "I have to fix that leaking roof", and all the sort of stuff that happens in between hardware and software. That surge of consciousness doesn't allow me to have the proper rest that I need before I engage with activities again.
Because of this I have a very cyclic rhythm, with whole weeks burning my energy into doing stuff, and weeks resting doing very little and thinking too much.
Now about my weekend. Friday night I was browsing the web, and a thought came to my head. "The way you use your terminal, says a lot about your personality", and I got curious, so I searched for, "Show me your terminal", and found a post in dev.to to see all kind of nice terminal setups, from the very minimalist to very feature rich oh-my-zsh themes with plugins for git, aws and what not. One of these pictures really got my attention, a guy had set up his terminal to show him, how many task has he done in the day, and how many cups of coffee has he had.
So by investigating how he set up his terminal to show in the prompt the number of successfully completed tasks in the day, I found out that he was using taskwarrior, he was also kind enough to share the source code of his prompt setup, which I bookmarked to later incorporate that into my oh-my-zsh config.
After reading about taskwarrior, I also got a reference to GTD, I don't remember if this was one of those thoughts that I have and follow immediately, or if I read something that led me to a YouTube video summarizing GTD.
In the end, after watching that GTD video, I decided to give it a try to organize my life, and help me find a remote job, keep my house in order, plan my social activities as "hang out with friends", "visit mom and dad", and give the proper amount of attention to my GF, with whom I am deeply in love, and willing to spend the remaining of my years with her.
So my fist task was.
task add Ask for GF's parents blessing.
Which of course I have no intention of doing right now, but is one of the things that I will eventually have to do.
Then it started, I started adding tasks, and things to do, and go through the whole Capture phase of GTD.
Now it is a good time to write a small summary of what I think GTD is.
GTD is a life habit of organizing your life in todo-lists. And it was a very specific core method, that in the video summary that I watched was called CPR.
Capture, Process and Review.
Capture:
When you capture you just add your tasks to a bucket list.
So I took a notebook and started writing down everything that I wanted to have done. I also started to capture ideas as they came up to me, I did this by writing a telegram saved message in my phone, or directly adding it as a task in TW.
Process:
I read my telegram messages and put them into my task warrior list, then I started to organize my tasks into projects, breaking down every task that was not an atomic unit.
* And different projects started to emerge from this. One of them was project:Housekeeping.
And here's my screenshot of what I did this weekend, also the number of projects that I have, and all the things that I have to do in order to have what I think would be a very balanced, fun, and productive life.
You'll be able to see in the screenshot, that there's a blocked task, yes, tw allows you to organize dependencies too, so one task is delegated, and blocked by the delegation task.
1 -
TL;DR: Embedded software guy needs to create a multi-instance sandbox environment in Jenkins for testing and not sure what good solutions are out there. Looking for suggestions.
So at work, we have these really cool integration tests that validate our system for flight safety. What's not so cool is that due to factors outside of my control, each test has to be run serially and the entire test suite can take many many hours. This is mostly due to a hardware limitation (not enough physical NICs), but there are other SW factors as well.
What I would like to do is somehow be able to wrap up all the resources into a neat little package and then deploy that package into some kind of virtual environment that can be instantiated on a Jenkins job. The NIC issue would be replaced with a virtual one and *theoretically* I should be able to spawn as many instances of this virtual environment as my CPU and RAM can handle. In short, I want to pseudo parallelize our test suite and drive down our testing time. Somehow I would need to be able to control this entire thing from a script of some sort.
Does anyone know of something out there that would satisfy these kinds of requirements? Double internet points if it's open source. -
So I've been using Duet on my iPad Pro for a couple years now (lets me use it as an external monitor via Lightning cable) and without issue. Shit, I've been quite happy with it. Then the other day, whilst hooked up to my work laptop, there was a power fluctuation that caused my laptop to stop sending power to connected devices. Which is fine - I have it plugged into a surge protector so these fluctuations shouldn't matter. After a few seconds the laptop resumed normal operation and my connected devices were up and running again.
But the iPad Pro, for some reason, went into an infinite boot loop sequence. It reboots, gets to the white Apple logo, then reboots again.
In the end, after putting the iPad into recovery mode and running Apple's update in iTunes (as they recommend), it proceeds to wipe all my data. Without warning. I lost more than a couple of years of notes, illustrations and photos. All in one fucking swoop.
To be clear, you get 2 options in iTunes when performing a device update:
1. UPDATE - will not mess with your data, will just update the OS (in this case iPadOS)
2. RESTORE - will delete everything, basically a factory reset
I clicked UPDATE. After the first attempt, it still kept bootlooping. So I did it again, I made sure I clicked UPDATE because I had not yet backed up my data. It then proceeds to do a RESTORE even though I clicked UPDATE.
Why, Apple? WHY.
After a solemn weekend lamenting my lost data, I've come a conclusion: fuck you Apple for designing very shitty software. I mean, why can't I access my device data over a cabled connection in the event I can't boot into the OS? If you need some form of authentication to keep out thieves, surely the mutltiple times you ask me to log in with my Apple ID on iTunes upon connecting the damn thing is more than sufficient?! You keep spouting that you have a secure boot chain and shit, surely it can verify a legitimate user using authenticated hardware without having to boot into the device OS?
And on the subject of backing up my data, you really only have 2 manual options here. Either (a) open iTunes, select your device, select the installed app, then selectively download the files onto my system; or (b) do a full device backup. Neither of those procedures is time-efficient nor straightforward. And if you want to do option b wirelessly, it can only be on iCloud. Which is bullshit. And you can't even access the files in the device backup - you can only get to them by restoring to your device. Even MORE bullshit.
Conversely, on my Android phone I can automate backups of individual apps, directories or files to my cloud provider of choice, or even to an external microSD card. I can schedule when the backups happen. I can access my files ANYTIME.
I got the iPad Pro because I wanted the best drawing experience, and Apple Pencil at the time was really the best you could get. But I see now it's not worth compromise of having shitty software. I mean, It's already 2021 but these dated piles of excrement that are iOS and iPadOS still act like it's 2011; they need to be seriously reviewed and re-engineered, because eventually they're going to end up as nothing but all UI fluff to hide these extremely glaring problems.2 -
WHAT. THE.
https://youtube.com/watch/...
1. watch video
2. comment your thoughts on it
3. read the following copypaste of my thoughts
4. comment your thoughts on whether I'm stupid or he's stupid
5. thanks
----
I am a programmer and I totally prefer windows.
1. I'm (besides other things) a game programmer, so I use the platform I develop for.
2. Linux is the best OS for developing... Linux. But I'm not developing linux. I want to use my OS and have it get in the way as little as possible, not test and debug and fix and develop the OS while i'm using it, while trying to do my actual work.
The less the OS gets in my way, the less stuff it requires me to do for any reason, the less manual management it needs me to do, the better.
OS is there to be a crossroads towards the actual utility. I want to not even notice having any OS at all. That would be the best OS, the one that I keep forgetting that I'm actually using. File access, run programs, ...DONE.
p.s.
if i can't trust you, a programmer, to be able to distinguish and click the correct, non-ad "download" button, or find a source that's not shady in this way, I don't want you to be my programmer. Everything you're expected to do is magnitude more complicated than finding a good site and/or finding the correct "Download" button and/or being able to verify that yes, what you downloaded is what you were after.
Sorry, but if "i can't find the right download button" is anywhere in your list of reasons why "linux is better", that's... Ridiculous.
6:15 "no rebooting" get outta here with this 2000 crap. because that's about the last year I actually had to reboot after installing for the thing to run.
Nowadays not even drivers. I'm watching a youtube video in 3d accelerated browser window while installing newest 3d drivers, I get a half-second flicker at the end and I'm done, no reboot.
the only thing I know still requires reboot within the last 15 years is Daemon Tools when you create a virtual drive, but that one still makes sense, since it's spiking the bios to think it has a hardware which is in fact just a software simulation....
10:00 "oops... something went wrong"
oh c'mon dude! you know that a) programs do their own error messages, don't put that on the OS
b) the "oops... something went wrong" when it's a system error, is just the message title, instead of "Error". there's always an "error id" or something which when you google it, you know precisely what is going on and you can easily find out how to fix it...18 -
Learn enough math to solve the problem Chat GPT (and two university math professors) have been unable to solve :(
The hardware is ready, the software is ready, and the only missing piece is to align a laser pointer with a Lambert's conformal conic projected map... I thought Chat GPT would be able to at least provide me with the necessary formulæ, but not...6 -
Ok, this is a weird one....
My main pc is a laptop running windows 10.
Recently it started doing this odd thing: sometimes when i click shutdown it shutdowns... And then turn back on by itself !!
Since i turn it on when i get back home and then shut it down when i go too sleep the first times it happened i thought that i pressed the restart button since they are close (and a few times it really happened) but since then i started beeing careful when clicking and yes, it turns on by itself wtf.
But this doesn't happen always so maybe it's a software bug (Does possession count as software issue ?) , if it was an hardware issue I'd expect it to happen always.
But since is not a major issue i keep forgetting of googling it.
Probably it's just a winzozz bug or it's the start of the AI uprising.... Who knows..3 -
My current "file/media server" is a crappy old falling apart windows box with a stupid mismash of internal and external drives with no redundancy. That sucks for a number of reasons, so planning on dropping around a grand or so (including drives) on doing it properly.
Space requirement would be around 20TB-ish of usable space, with 1 disk's worth of redundancy. That can include a newish 5TB drive I have lying around however. Would also run either Plex / Jellyfin, so some horsepower for transcoding would be nice (but no need for more than a single 1080 stream at once.) 24/7 operation, so don't want anything too power hungry.
Current (loose) thinking on the hardware side is an AM4 board and a reasonably low end CPU, 3x8TB WD golds. Software side, probably CentOS, then mergerfs + snapraid. Anyone got any insight as to other options? Hardware not my speciality in particular, so open to suggestions.14 -
Yesturday when I got off work I turned my PC off and it installed some updates... Came in the today turned on the PC and the fucking Win 10 instantly crashes with Sadface of Death "could not run critical service"
Recovery does not work as usual... No safe mode no nothing!
Fuck you Microsoft just stop puting your nose in to hardware and fix your fucking software! Now I have to reinstall all of my development tools and other work related shit... Thank god I pushed my changes! -
Can somebody please explain to me what this company does?
https://www.signavio.com/
Its kinda technical mumbo jumbo for processes?
Appearantly its pretty much worth because they been bought up by sap.
Sorry if it does not belong here. But i really dont understand these management process optimization tools and why they should be so important? We do our stuff with confluence and jira and thats it. But we are also a software conpany nothing todo with hardware...6
Top Tags
Weekly Rant
View