The highest data transfer rate today - 256 gigabytes per second - was achieved when the cleaner's vacuum cleaner accidentally sucked the flash drive in from the floor.

Today I finally found out, what's real 64GB/s speed. My vacuum cleaner ate my flashdisk.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Then, next week, it happened again.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The cleaning staff came in.

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

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

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

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

To be a good developer, you must thrive in chaos, and have an insatiable desire to turn it into order.

All user input, both work tasks and actual application input, is pure fucking chaos.

The only way to turn that input into anything usable, is to interpret, structure and categorize it, to describe the rules for transformation as adequately as you can.

Sometimes companies create semi-helpful roles to assist you with this process. Often, these people are so unaware of the delicacy of the existing chaos, that any decision they make just ripples out in waves leaving nearly irreparable confusion and destruction in its path.

So applications themselves also slowly wear down into chaos under pressure of chaotic steak-holders which never seem to be able to choose between peppercorn or bernaise sauce for their steaks.

Features are added, data is migrated between formats, rules become unclear. Is ketchup even fucking valid, as a steak sauce?

The only way to preserve an application long term, is refactoring chaos into order.

But... the ocean of chaos will never end.

You must learn to swim in it.

All you can hope to do is create little pools of clarity where new creative ideas can freely spawn.

Ideas which will no doubt end up polluting their own environment, but that's a problem for tomorrow.

So you must learn to deal with the infinite stream of perplexed reactions from those who can't attach screenshots to issue reports.

You must deflect dragging conversations from those who never quite manage to translate gut feeling into rational sentences.

You must learn to deal with the fact that in reality there are no true microservice backends. There are no clean React frontends. There are no normalized databases. Full test coverage, well-executed retrospectives, finished sprints -- they are all as real as spherical cows in a vacuum.

There is no such thing as clean code.

There is only "relatively cleaner code", and even then there are arguments as to why it would be "subjectively relatively cleaner code".

Every repository, every product, every team and every company is an amalgamation of half-implemented ideals, well-intended tug of war games, and brilliantly shattered dreams.

You will encounter fragmented shards of perfect APIs, miles of tangled barbed documentation, beheaded validator classes, bloody mangled corpses of analytical dashboards, crumbled concrete databases.

You must be able to breathe in those thick toxic clouds of rotting technical and procedural debt, look at your reflection in the locker room mirror while you struggle yourself into a hazmat suit, and think:

"Fuck yes, I was born for this job".

New rant = Rant.type(['non-dev', 'public transportation']).init()

So i am taking the bus now to see a friend, and this fucking whale woman comes on board with a baby caddy, except, it wasn't for a baby, but for a fucking dog the size of a brick. That already in itself makes me grumble because dogs have fucking legs and there is no fucking real need to carry them around like newborns.... Anyways this woman sits and takes up a lot of space for the 'handicapped' persons for her fucking baby dog... So far no real issue there since people with disabilities hardly get on this bus line. A fzw bus stops later an equally whale black woman gets on the bus, obviously struggling with her size and her caddy filled with groceries...

There is enough room to accomodate the baby caddy and her groceries.
That fucking white whale says to her 'there is no room there, move someplace else'... The black woman stands there in disbelief, and this is the first time i look up, giving the 'the fuck you just say bitch' look to the white whale. I mention there is enough room and the black whale sits carefully next to the dog caddy.

Now the bus takes a sharp turn, the dog caddy tips over due to the g-forces it causes...and inmediately this white whale shouts to the black whale 'fucking retard, don't tip my dog over!' this while the black woman apologises for the fall of the caddy not even being her fault...

This angered me so puch that i rantzd to this woman: 'madam, thzre is such a thing called physics, the bus made a sharp turn and your stupud useless space-wasting dog caddy tipped over bzcause of that. Don't just go accusing people for your own degenerate racist lifestyle. I suggest you hold on to it and apologise to the lady'

She then murmles incomprehensibly and gives a butthurt look, rhe black woman thanks me and tries to remain very quiet on her seat, eventually she gets off

This fucking thing makes me angry to a level i wanna toeturz that whale by peeling off her skin with garden fence metal wiri g, suck the fat out of her body and brain with an industrial vacuum cleaner and put her in the fucking oven baking in her own fat, of course without any anesthetics...

Damnit all to hell!

Also, why on earth do dogs need caddy's? They got perfectly fine legs!

I know, sadist inside

Worst disturbance while working?

Some of my faves:
- Mgr flying his new $400 drone around the office (hitting walls, ceiling, etc). I mentioned the price because he crashed it a week later (un-repairable kind of crash), so I didn't feel too sorry for his loss.
- Mgr trying out his new blowgun and blowing darts at a cardboard box down/bewtween the cube hallway (where anyone could walk out of at any time). We would hear the "pfffft" and a loud 'Yea!'.
- Mgr would walk by a cube entry-way, fart, and walk away laughing.
- Mgr called me into area and his desk+the floor area around his desk was covered in peanut shells.
Me: "Wow, you got a mess here."
Mgr: "Yea, got tired of trying to hit the trash can. Maintenance will vacuum the office this weekend."
The mess was one thing, but what disturbed me the most was this asshole thinks Maintenance-Jim has nothing better to do than clean up after this so-called adult.

Karma kicked in and an hour later the owner's wife (we're still a family owned company, so he+his wife are on friendly basis with everyone) stopped by to say hi and walked in on the mess.
June: "What do we have here!?"
Mgr: "Oh...um...uh..I was eating a few peanuts and putting the shells in the trash can and accidentally knocked it over. I was on my way to get the vacuum cleaner."
June: "Hmmm...this looks like more than a few. *You* clean it up right now and *never* let me see this again!"
Mgr: "Yes..yes ma'am...right now.."

Whole office heard the exchange and it was frickin' awesome.

Years ago we deployed this system with a SQL DB on a separate windows server.
Every now and then we had error messages saying that the system could not connect to the db. It was going on for about 5 minutes or so and then the db was up again.
We built a bunch of fallback logic to handle it gracefully.
Then one day one of the guys was in the "server room". It was not a real server room but like a dedicated office in another building.
He saw how the cleaning lady came in, unplugged the server's cable from the wall socket and plugged in the vacuum cleaner...

HOW FUCKING HARD CAN IT BE TO NOT STORE PASSWORDS IN CLEARTEXT AND THEN PROCEED TO SEND ME AN UNENCRYPTED EMAIL WITH THE PASSWORD IN IT??? THE SITE HAS A PREMIUM FUCKING SSL AND SAFETY CERTIFICATES YET THEY STILL DON'T COMPLY TO THIS? FUCK YOU! IF IT WASN'T FOR THAT I HAD TO ORDER A NEW SCREEN FOR MY BROKEN PHONE, YOU COULD'VE SUCKED BETTER THAN ME + VACUUM CLEANER.

Sorry abt that. But for real, mytrendphone stores passwords in plain texts and waves a fucking safety certificate in your face...

I fucking love HP.

Why, you may ask, given that I've ranted about their crap so many times now? Great question!

I love HP because every time I go to town on their hardware because yet again it got me infuriated somehow, I don't feel bad about it afterwards. Instead I feel oddly satisfied, liberated from another piece of crap from them. And besides, usually it's their or Acer's shitty hardware that gets me worked up anyway.

That said, fuck you HP. Filthy Microsucking pieces of shit.

.. anyway. I've just went around disassembling an old vacuum cleaner this morning, to liberate its 800W single phase AC motor. I'll probably have to underrun it with a step-down transformer but at e.g. 200VAC it should probably work no problem 🙂

Thanks to @C0D4 I rediscovered Folding@Home!

I've been running this on a very powerful server at home at full-speed for a few days now (quite some cores being used to the max right now, it's like I have a vacuum cleaner running full-time in my place 😄)

Then, last night it hit me that I have quite a few servers running close to idle (rented ones).....

I'm now running a total of 4 servers at full capacity with Folding@Home.

Can recommend!

Unpopular opinion: Fuck laptops

Even with proper care and monthly maintenance, they're still loud as a vacuum cleaner, and hot as a fucking stove. Yes I know it's a bit hotter these days and maybe mine isn't the latest top of the line model, but even my gf's Inspirion 17R (old I know, but she got one unused) tho relatively quiet, heats up as all hell even when it's on a cooling pad as soon as you try to do anything on it.
Maybe I'm alone on this, but I just think that when it comes to laptops, it's go big or go home. My Desktop PC is a relic of the past, but it still purrs like a fucking kitten, even under heavy loads in this weather

!rant

TL;DR: "Gather all resources before working on any project and committing to the client... & over smartness can be deadly"

Couldn't stop my laughter after reading this one.

A new vacuum salesman knocked at the door….

A lady opened it. Before she could speak... The salesman rushed into the living room and emptied a bag of cow dung on the carpet.

Salesman: - Madam, if I couldn't clean this up in the next 3 mins with my new powerful vacuum cleaner, I will EAT all this!!

Lady: Do you need Chili Sauce with that?

Salesman: - Why Madam?

Lady: - Because there's no electricity in the house...!!!

😂😂😂

This kid on the tape is me. I'm not even two years old there and I'm already messing around with wires.

Five minutes later on that tape I figured out how to turn the vacuum cleaner on and tried to tie it to the cassette deck.

No wonder why I'm a programmer now 😂

Have you heard about Apple's new vacuum cleaner?

It's supposed to be the only Apple product that DOESN'T suck

Fixing the fucking vacuum cleaner, looks like it finally died, dunno how and why, maybe the carbon brushes in the motor are gone or it's just full of dust and crap because noone changes the fucking dust filter... ever!

Many people asked me this.

Every programming language is made of another, and because of it is the lowest level language every language is made of it. So what does assembly made of?
...

When you buy a vacuum cleaner they give you instructions to how to use it. When processor producer creates a processor they give an instruction to how to use it. Assembly programming language is nothing but an instruction that processor producer gave us.

Today's finished projects :
Mini vacuum cleaner:
Works. Just need better patles to be really effective.
Portable lighter wire solderer :
Busted.
Works but the flame must be always on. Takes time to heat. Good for a tight spot and you can buy the tools for it anywhere.
Many if the coil is more open... I'll check on beta 2 (not quitting yet)

3d Prints.
So... At this time we think that everything is already invented...
And I keep making new stuff...
New Idea, mini vacuum cleaner... only found one design online and was so badly done... So I made mine.
Happens all the time... Search, nothing I like, do it myself. And worst, I'm not even good at CAD programs lol.

Any Ideas for tools to make?

Something "very" unique happened to me this morning/night: I've managed to lose my sleepiness after just 7:45 hours of sleep (interrupted sleep, actual sleep was more like 5 hours). I had trouble falling asleep and woke up like 4-5 times in total. Last time I woke up at around 7:50am I decided to put up some white noise (vacuum cleaner sounds on yt) to relax me and at least make me feel like I'm having a superficial sleep.

PS: I usually sleep 10+ hours without even trying, most of the time I only wake up from bed so I don't feel bad for wasting half my day doing basically nothing. I start work at 11am and even then it's still hard for me to wake up at around 10am, sometimes I just pay Uber to get me to work just for the extra 20-30 mins of sleep.

I bought medion md 19500 vacuum cleaner refurbished for about 74 usd, it can be controlled using ir remote

I disconnected vacuum top and it’s still working so my plan is to use arduino instead of attached remote to control robot

I can try to identify where ir sensor is to directly connect to it, but don’t know if my skills are enough to do it.

edit:
to compare, roomba create 3 costs 450$ and I can buy this vacuum used without remote for 38 usd

Devrant should have a "preview" image option for images uploaded on a rant. You could just end up uploading images of you and your vacuum cleaner doing some "cleaning"
@dfox

!rant
I'll move in with my girlfriend in August. So it's time to get a cleaning robot!
To either iRobot Roomba or Neato Botvac.

Which would you suggest and why? From the readings I've done so far, when it's about performance it's Roomba 980 >= Botvac Connected > Roomba 880, but then again the Roomba 980 is a lot more expensive.

Is there a dev, as lazy as I am with hands on expirience?

Note: there will be only a small carpet below the table in the living room and the appartment will have 4 rooms: living, sleeping, kitchen and bath. As the house is a little older, there's a "obstacle" the doors between the rooms to climb of about 1cm.

Thanks for suggestions in advance. On another note: I'm planing to get connected lightbulps and speakers, so we'll be able to control most of the stuf from our smartphones. So far I don't see any advantages, incorporating a vacuum bot in there, as long as you can set a scedule, any thoughts on that?

him: get dressed, is not summer anymore
her: I'm cleaning and I'm hot...if you wish you can undress and go to the other room, where is the vacuum cleaner
him: 👀

Biggest disturbance would be a colleague, but even worse if one of those colleagues has a vacuum cleaner 😒

My upright A/C doesn't have both an outside intake and exhaust, just an outside exhaust, so it intakes through the back.

My cat S&D'd right next to the intake while it was on full blast.

just had to evacuate the room and pull the smell out with my grandpa's weird closed-door air purifier thing
(it goes across the entire doorgap at top and bottom and is basically a massive vacuum that sucks everything through an industrial air filter and blows it back into the room cleaner on the other side, looks and works well for being homemade)

on second thought where do all these strange gadgets my family has come from