pm: our client wants a proprietary pdf compression app.
me: Okay gimme 3 days and some sample PDFs.
pm: they won't supply any sample PDFs because they contain confidential information.
me: okay fine, I'll download some from the interwebs.

** 3 days later **

me: here is the pdf compression app. all done and works with all of about 100 PDFs we tested with.
pm: okay great I'll have the client take a look.

** half and hour later **

pm: the client said that the compression app errors out.
me: okay I'll go look at the server logs to see what's up.

** 10 seconds later **

me: what the shit is a "foxit phantompdf" file.
pm: it's the proprietary pdf format that they are using.
me: oh joy. I'll go try to find some sample files and see if I can fix it.

** 1 hour later, no sample files found **

pm: got anything?
me: *sobs obnoxiously*

People who ask a question on the interwebs, solves it by themselves and just say "It's OK. I've solved it" without explaining how should have their Internet removed (maybe some light torture too).

This review.... it hurt me and made me laugh at the same time.

I dont even know anymore.

I love how some services have trap pricing, pretty much like drug dealers of the interwebs.

Me: I would like to send e-mail to my clients.

Company: Sure bro, here, take our service, you can send emails to all your clients, just 5€ per month!

A year later

Me: I have now over thousand customers, I would like to send more emails and implement some new features.

Company: Thousand customers you say?

Me: Yeah

Company: All in our servers you say?

Me: Yeah, thanks for the great service!

Company: Sure, no problem. We can enable you additional services for 40 000€ per month, half of your liver and two of your first born babies.

I absolutely love the email protocols.

IMAP:
x1 LOGIN user@domain password
x2 LIST "" "*"
x3 SELECT Inbox
x4 LOGOUT

Because a state machine is clearly too hard to implement in server software, clients must instead do the state machine thing and therefore it must be in the IMAP protocol.

SMTP:
I should be careful with this one since there's already more than enough spam on the interwebs, and it's a good thing that the "developers" of these email bombers don't know jack shit about the protocol. But suffice it to say that much like on a real letter, you have an envelope and a letter inside. You know these envelopes with a transparent window so you can print the address information on the letter? Or the "regular" envelopes where you write it on the envelope itself?
Yeah not with SMTP. Both your envelope and your letter have them, and they can be different. That's why you can have an email in your inbox that seemingly came from yourself. The mail server only checks for the envelope headers, and as long as everything checks out domain-wise and such, it will be accepted. Then the mail client checks the headers in the letter itself, the data field as far as the mail server is concerned (and it doesn't look at it). Can be something else, can be nothing at all. Emails can even be sent in the future or the past.

Postfix' main.cf:
You have this property "mynetworks" in /etc/postfix/main.cf where you'd imagine you put your own networks in, right? I dunno, to let Postfix discover what your networks are.. like it says on the tin? Haha, nope. This is a property that defines which networks are allowed no authentication at all to the mail server, and that is exactly what makes an open relay an open relay. If any one of the addresses in your networks (such as a gateway, every network has one) is also where your SMTP traffic flows into the mail server from, congrats the whole internet can now send through your mail server without authentication. And all because it was part of "your networks".

Yeah when it comes to naming things, the protocol designers sure have room for improvement... And fuck email.

Oh, bonus one - STARTTLS:
So SMTP has this thing called STARTTLS where you can.. unlike mynetworks, actually starts a TLS connection like it says on the tin. The problem is that almost every mail server uses self-signed certificates so they're basically meaningless. You don't have a chain of trust. Also not everyone supports it *cough* government *cough*, so if you want to send email to those servers, your TLS policy must be opportunistic, not enforced. And as an icing on the cake, if anything is wrong with the TLS connection (such as an MITM attack), the protocol will actively downgrade to plain. I dunno.. isn't that exactly what the MITM attacker wants? Yeah, great design right there. Are the designers of the email protocols fucking retarded?

Saw this on the interwebs. Left: customer. Right: employee.

The left one looks like a nice type of customer-person though.

I like to imagine that the employee-guy does not understand why the computer is not working, at which point the customer-person says: "Oh, I can fix that."

Got the job!

"We prefer anonymity so you can't tell the interwebs."

Wut?

/* rant */

I freaking hate it when people call me to fix their 9 gazillion dollar ultra extreme enthusiast alien technology pc just so they can play a a god damn freaking son of a damn bloody bitchy fb game on 9000 fps in 4k while some people struggle to have 6 tabs open at the same time so they can code+compile+preview+consult the interwebs. And lets just not mention the amount of monitors mmkay?

Found an old laptop in the apartment I was staying in and wrote a shitty incremental game in HTML and JavaScript with no libraries because there was no interwebs. At least alcohol is mega cheap in eastern Europe.

Quite an aggressive remarketing strategy.. Caught my attention yes, but this crap all around the interwebs would eventually become irritating as hell..

Very. I saved 27,000 pounds by never going and teaching myself using the interwebs. ALL HAIL THE INTERNET

A follow up rant to my rant about "breaking the interwebs":

I fixed the interwebs and I also installed OpenVPN on one of my Raspberry Pis, it seems to be working just like I wanted it to work :3

I am a good person. I can even say I am a good programmer. I have worked hard to get where I am and that shows perseverance. Although, where I am right now is not what I expected, I am somewhere. I can do something. I have good intentions.

Someday, I will build software which will be used by millions of people around the interwebs. And they will love me, for I will have made their lives better....in some way. Some will even consider paying me for it. Not because the well placed and non intrusive donate button I put there, but out of pure adoration and bare necessity to preserve someone as brilliant and precious as me. I shall be the definition of success. But I long for neither adoration nor wealth, for I am humble or at least that is how I will be perceived.

Like flies to the honey my success will attract big evil corporations to acquire my business. And I shall spit on their wretched face....at first. I would like to be wooed. Such display of integrity shall inspire generations of programmers. Let ye be inspired. There will be those who envy my achievements and they will be mocked and shunned by my true believers. But being the kind soul that I am, I will bring back my minions, for it could a PR nightmare.

All these events will take place in a not too distant future. Sure, I am going through a dark time now, it will pass. 'tis nothing but me transitioning from a lame ass PHP coder moth to this totally badass software engineer who is also a cool bro. This eclipse of my brain shall pass. My neurons will fire in all directions like photons from the sun during late winter, for it may overheat and we definitely don't want that.

I pray to the gods of engineering to grant my wishes. Trust me guys, you will be thanking yourselves when donate my money to charities that will help me set up. But that's another scheme. Amen.

I broke the interwebs XD XD XD
nepripojené - disconnected

The DHCP does not see my computer, my computer says it is disconnected and I am still able to browse the internet perfectly fine :D

I don't like when

you have a couple of years of experience with some language and you're like "I should read a good book about it, and have some proper solid foundation instead of playing by ear".

So you get a book and what follows is a very jarring experience.

Because for the first 8 chapters they get into the basics of the language.

You're occasionally like "interesting, I did not know that".

But for the most part you're like "yes, for fucking christ I know that, everybody knows that",

or you complain about the author being redundant,

or about the outdatedness of the book, since most documentation is now in the interwebs

or you reach flawed conclusions out of frustration like "this isn't making me any money, I could get on upwork, or do some bounties instead of wasting time on this"

then you start to skim through the pages like "I know this, and this, and this" until you realize you're in some page you have no fucking idea what it's talking about, as if you ended up on the wrong side of town

so you start backtracking (frustration is going critical at this point)

but backtracking is annoying because it's not well defined where you stopped getting it, as if in page 33 you were getting it 100%, but 0% on page 34, it's more like a gradual, irregular decrease,

so you have no idea where to start re reading from.

you just shove that shit into the wall at that point.

Some of these are learning discipline problems.

I guess there are ways to mitigate them, such as writing down questions of things not understood, co reading, etc.

But the one thing I don't think I can't get past is when authors write like shit,

like being redundant, using different words to say the same shit

or using confusing sentences that can mean different things at the same time,

or using the incorrect terminology, eg: if I were teaching OOP, saying shit like "classes create objects" but later on saying something like "classes create instances".
They usually nail the definitions the first time, but then use different terms for the same thing. It's shit.

And I think that's a writing culture that I hate.
From school you are taught to bot repeat words.

To say the same shit in different ways.

To be descritive, but vague.

That's absolutely shitty for programming in my opinion.

Whenever I see anyone mentioning anything about JavaScript (IRL or the interwebs), I desperately want to join the conversation.

~rant
I think we need to change way how websites deliver themselves to its users. This HTML CSS JS clusterfuck is just a huge PITA in the ass.

What is a website?
It's an application where users find, communicate or share information, can buy or sell their penis pumps and loads of shady stuff.
Why must a website (the delivered application) be split into multiple languages/scripts and lots of HTTP requests?
In my opinion, PWA is a start to make us look at websites more like apps as we are used to on the machine, but they don't solve the mess.
Per my experience, many people working on websites regularly confuse what's executed on the server and what is on the client. They send data to the client via XHR, for example full DB tables of private data, just to then filter it in their beloved Array.filter function.
You can tell those people again and again and this is why I start thinking that the Web, as we know it, needs a big change.

Connecting my Pi to the interwebs through my computer should be easy, right?

NOPE!

Two hours of fiddling with badly-documented config files after I started, I can SSH in but not access the internet on the Pi. None of the guides seem to want to actually work...

Today was the best day of my life. Being a jack of all trades, that I am, I decided to migrate a client's website to an new shiny self-managed server from a shared host. So I started by setting up a web server and deployment being run from a group bash scripts. This morning everything was ready to go after some testing, all that was left to do, was to update my DNS to point to the new server. I got that sorted, the DNS update took about 1 hour to propagate. So the homepage was loading just like before, it felt like I had just achieved something worthy of a mention on the interwebs — at least. Then I tried to navigate to another page other than the homepage and none of those were working as expected, at this point I was only getting 404s. Tweaked to settings and then all I could get were 502s. I spend about 8 hours dreading that uncomfortable call from the client, luckily that call never came through and all is well again. All this drama was caused by a bad .htaccess.

Having ADD. Not helpful when the interwebs are a click away.

Ouch - got my first Windows blue screen in years! (Lacking a picture of it, I stole this one from the interwebs)

Cause: The LITE-ON SSD cache drive. So, can't blame MS for this one, but BSODs are great flamebait regardless of cause.

The SSD was 3 years old, which seems a very short life span for an SSD, unless it's an OCZ.

I have a job interview on Thursday for a .Net stack suite of web apps. Thing is: I know C# and SQL Server pretty good (not necessarily together but that comes pretty easy to me). They also use Javascript/jQuery/ECMAScipt (they said it not me) and ASP.Net. In my web dev days I was mostly backend so I am super super rusty on Javascript and, though to a lesser extent, ASP. Do you have any tutorials and refreshers you recommend? Preferably in an IDE so I can hide my shame from the interwebs? Love you.

I once was sitting in a somewhat boring class on networks and computer architecture towards the end of the term. Nobody was really listening and the lecture was kind of a collection of random bits and pieces related to the subject matter.
So I tried out playing Duke Nukem on my rather weak laptop on DosBox. I was sitting quite in front of the class room, and the profesor could clearly hear my fan working like crazy. Later in his lecture he did a short excourse on cloud gaming, showing us nVidia's graphics card cloud where you could do remote gaming, the graphics being rendered remotely and streamed to your box over the interwebs.
I looked up from my game and said to the professor: "If I had this now, my fan would not be that loud." Even the professor laughed.

!rant
there's gotta be another drunk post of me now sores
What I love about devRant aren't only the rants but really the comments. In almost every rant the comet section is at least as funny ass the rant it self. This shows how awesome this community isch.
Don't drunk as much as me and I really do.enjoy being part of this aesome part of the interwebs.

I can't do my job without internet. Guess which construction fuckers couldn't keep their shovels in the right holes and knocked out our power and connection to the interwebs. That's right. Those numbskulls right outside my building. The same ones who've been incompetent enough to have this project going on all. summer. long.

I think I'm gonna give up on privacy. It's hard to use the interwebs without JavaScript. And I use a phone on which you can't install lineage os or any other secure rom.

after having to deal with a lot of weird "rewrites" and "refactorings" by co-workers i started to add this comment into the head of my sourcefiles:

You may think you know what the following code does.
But you dont. Trust me.
Fiddle with it, and youll spend many sleepless nights cursing the moment you thought youd be clever enough to "optimize" the code below. Now close this file and go play with something else.

Found this somewhere on the interwebs and since i use it the "refactorings" and "optimizations" of my code stopped nearly completely

Have any of you fin devs out there on the interwebs had any experience with building social networks using `Stream`??

I am looking into their API for use in a golang project of mine but I am unsure about a few things...

1. Reliability
2. Scalability and the cost of it
3. General API quality, in Golang specifically but any comments are great.

It's a stretch I'm sure but if there was a place that folks would know it would be here @ devRant

I discovered programming around the age of 12, when my parents bought their first computer:
A Pentium II, 233 MHz monster with Windoozle 95 and even 2 USB ports. Additionally we had an internet connection on crazy fast 56k. The machine was as slow as a snail on heroin, but I soon started to dig around in the file explorer and system control panel.
Searching the interwebs by what the obscure file endings meant, I found some mailing lists about quickbasic and one about C.
QuickBasic was pretty easy and it didnt take long to get some beep abuse script running and a basic text "game". Later on I got into HTML and PHP.

Being still somewhat of a child at that time, QuickBasic really opened my mind to imagine what else could be possible by using just a computer, your brain and lots of willpower.
It was the moment I realized, I wanted to really get into programming or electronics after school.

Hey baby, wanna go to my place and do some QuickBasic and chill? 😏💦

Getting completely wired into interwebs makes me boil the same tea water at least 3 times over again.
Running low on RAM apparently.

Ok so, another post got me thinking…

Every browser I’ve tried sucks one way or another. Chrome, Firefox, Vivaldi etc…

Safari on my work Mac is so far the least annoying one, although it seems to have an issue with Google’s services…

On my personal computer (Linux) I use mainly Vivaldi, tho I have Firefox installed as well since apparently Vivaldi doesn’t quite support everything on the interwebs…

So, fellow ranters, what are your favoured browsers (all platforms go!) and most importantly, why?