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Craziest bug, not so much in the sense of what it was (although it was itself wacky too), but in what I went through to fix it.
The year was 1986. I was finishing up coding on a C64 demo that I had promised would be out on a specific weekend. I had invented a new demo effect for it, which was pretty much the thing we all tried to do back then because it would guarantee a modicum of "fame", and we were all hyper-ego driven back then :) So, I knew I wanted to have it perfect when people saw it, to maximize impressiveness!
The problem was that I had this ONE little pixel in the corner of the screen that would cycle through colors as the effect proceeded. A pixel totally apart from the effect itself. A pixel that should have been totally inactive the entire time as part of a black background.
A pixel that REALLY pissed me off because it ruined the utter perfection otherwise on display, and I just couldn't have that!
Now, back then, all demos were coded in straight Assembly. If you've ever done anything of even mild complexity in Assembly, then you know how much of a PITA it can be to find bugs sometimes.
This one was no exception.
This happened on a Friday, and like I said, I promised it for the weekend. Thus began my 53 hours of hell, which to this day is still the single longest stretch of time straight that I've stayed awake.
Yes, I spent literally over 2+ days, sitting in front of my computer, really only ever taking bio breaks and getting snacks (pretty sure I didn't even shower)... all to get one damn pixel to obey me. I would conquer that f'ing pixel even if it killed me in the process!
And, eventually, I did fix it. The problem?
An 'i' instead of an 'l'. I shit you not!
After all these years I really don't remember the details, except for the big one that sticks in my mind, that I had an 'i' character in some line of code where an 'l' should have been. I just kept missing it, over and over and over again. I mean, I kinda understand after many hours, your brain turns to mush. and you make more mistakes, so I get missing it after a while... but missing it early on when I was still fresh just blows my mind.
As I recall, I finally uploaded the demo to the distro sight at around 11:30pm, so at least I made my deadline before practically dropping dead in bed (and then having to get up for school the next morning- D'oh!). And it WAS a pretty impressive demo... though I never did get the fame I expected from it (most likely because it didn't get distributed far and wide enough).
And that's the story of what I'd say was my craziest bug ever, the one that probably came closest to killing me :)5 -
Today I'm ranting about Windows. No, it's not "WiNdOwS sUcKs!", it's more like "But why!?"
See, I'm an IT guy for the year, and in my office they use Windows. Now once upon a time, they had Active Directory and all that (well, actually, they still do) but then they got some new computers running Windows 10, and for some reason they just couldn't join them to the domain!
Why can't they, you ask? Well, Microsoft only allows Win 10 Pro and up to join a Domain, and since these computers came with Win 10 Home, that wasn't possible.
Long story short, I now have some 30 computers that need to be upgraded (possibly from 7) to Win 10 Pro, and joined to the Domain.
Thing is, I would like to do that all in one go, so I look into how to automatically setup Windows.
"Ah! Got it, provisioning packages!"
Lest you think they work let me spare you now: they don't. Just like real computers where everything is different, provisioning packages failed to work twice, and after wasting about a week trying to make it work, I gave up.
So now I realized that I need to try a different method, a custom windows image. Issue is, I've got no clue how to make one. See, microsoft decided to go all in on the provisioning packages thing (they do have advantages in certain use cases), and seemed to decide that making custom images was no longer necessary, so they documentation was nearly impossible to find.
But after a lot of searching, I figured out how to do it:
1. Install Windows in a VM.
2. Put it in audit mode.
3. Install your stuff.
4. Create an unattend.xml file with certain customizations.
5. Put the unattend in Windows\System32\Sysprep
6. Generalize the image.
7. Boot WinPE.
8. Open the console.
9. Capture the image.
10. Wait an hour or two.
11. Done!
I'm over simplifying, it was a huge PITA, and yet there were still issues.
Maybe another time I'll talk about those.22 -
I have an interview tomorrow, but I kinda feel like a dick about it.
A former coworker asked for a reference for a job and told me about the position.. I agreed, and a recruiter dealing with them calls to get it. While on the call I leave them a brief blurb about my skillset and we agree that I'll keep his details on file just in case (I wasn't looking to move on, but I do like to keep in touch with recruiters who don't seem to be a pita)
A month goes by and my position is suddenly ending soon, so I call him and ask if there is anything new.. no, but.. the same employer I gave a reference for would like to talk with me about that same position.
I'd never have heard about the job without my former coworker asking for a reference, but on the other hand, if they are still looking after a month, surely my former coworker wasn't really still in the running, right?
Anyway.. awkward conversation ahead should I get the job.
Also, wish me luck 😁7 -
Daghhhhhhhh Kafka.
Set it up, seems to work fine.
Oh no...! Take a broker down, then messages go missing - hmm, that's not right. Fine, I'll just look into... Ah, bad replication factor, my fault. So then it's all fixed! Woop. Wait, no. Some messages still going missing occasionally. Oh, only set to "at most once" delivery. My bad, fix that, and... now everything is out of order. Oh, ok, partitions setup wrongly. Wtf, now the whole thing stalls when there's a network blip until a restart. Right, ok, looks like commits have to receive acks in the library I'm using before continuing. Switch to a library that uses CommitWithoutReply. Brilliant....
Apart from said library seems to have commits failing all over the place because it keeps trying to commit during a rebalance 🙄😒😤
The frustrating thing is I KNOW for a fact that Kafka is a fault tolerant, resilient, horizontally scalable thing capable of handling stupid amounts more than I'm throwing at it without missing a beat. But damn,configuring it, and checking you've configured it sanely is a royal, monumental PITA.5 -
My past 16hours activities
Woke up > destroyed a healthy running environment while trying to setup dual monitor on my manjaro kde > found out the nvidia driver was the culprit the whole the > the whole thing was a PITA > reinstalled the kde with windows dual boot > did the previous task 4/5 times till I felt satisfied ( call be a dumb but it is what it is ) > and now after wasting the whole fucking day I am setting up the environment finally.
Still I'm not sure if I'll be able to finish this shit before 4 am in the morning . It's now 1.26 AM .
Life is an interesting loop of hell .4 -
If you've ever tried using Go plugins raise your hand.
If you've ever tried doing plugins in Go, raise your hand.
If you think that the following rant will be interesting, raise your hand.
If you raised your hand, press [Read More]:
This is a tale of pain and sorrow, the sorrow of discovering that what could be a wonderful feature is woefully incomplete, and won't be for a very long time...
Go plugins are a cool feature: dynamically load pre-compiled code, and interact with it in a useful and relatively performant way (e.g. for dynamically extending the capabilities of your program). So far it sounds great, I know right?
Now let me list off some issues (in order of me remembering them):
1. You can't unload them (due to some bs about dlopen), so you need to restart the application...
2. They bundle the stdlib like a regular Go binary, despite the fact that they're meant to be dynamic!
3. #2 wouldn't be so bad if they didn't also require identical versions of all dependencies in both binaries (meaning you'd need to vendor the dependencies, and also hope you are using the right Go version).
4. You need to use -trimpath or everything dies...
All in all, they are broken and no one is rushing to fix it (literally, the Go team said they aren't really supporting it currently...).
So what other options are there for making plugins in Go?
There's the Hashicorp method of using RPC, where you have two separate applications one the plugin, one the plugin server, and they communicate over RPC. I don't like it. Why? Because it feels like a hack, it's not really efficient and it carries a fear of a limitation that I don't like...
Then we come to a somewhat more clever approach: using Lua (or any other scripting language), it's well known, it's what everyone uses (at least in games...). But, it simply is too hard to use, all the Go Lua VMs I could find were simply too hard to set up...
Now we come to the most creative option I've seen yet: WASM. Now you ask "WASM!? But that's a web thing, how are you gonna make that work?" Indeed, my son, it is a web thing, but that doesn't mean I can't use it! Someone made a WASM VM for Go, and the pros are that you can use any WASM supporting language (i.e. any/all of them). Problem inefficient, PITA to use, and also suffers from the same issues that were preventing me from using Lua.
Enter Yaegi, a Go interpreter created by the same guys who made (and named) Traefik. Yes, you heard me right, an INTERPRETER (i.e. like python) so while it's not super performant (and possibly suffering from large inefficiency issues), it's very easy to set up, and it means that my plugins can still be written in Go (yay)! However, don't think this method doesn't have its own issues, there's still the problem of effectively abstracting different types of plugins without requiring too much boilerplate (a hard problem that I'm actively working on, commits coming soon). However, this still feels to be the best option.
As you can see, doing plugins in Go is a very hard problem. In the coming weeks (hopefully), I'm going to (attempt to at least) benchmark all the different options, as well as publish a library that should help make using Yaegi based plugins easier. All of this stuff will go (see what I did there 😉) in a nice blog post that better explains the issues and solutions. But until then I have some coding to do...
Have a good night(/day)!13 -
I just had to update a package on Pypi after a number of years. It's kind of a PITA.
And then I realized, it's still better than npm. Wild. -
Implementing my own PHP library for Station Playlist Studio, mainly for grabbing the list of songs and requesting songs to be played.
Such a legacy connection... Bad command scheme...
Having it succesfully request songs when UTF-8 ain't even supported properly, is a pita.
Luckily there's been an update to SPL about 2 years later, and my code still works. (:
(Not my biggest accomplishment so far, but those are under RMA..)
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