Google is full of assholes!

Just paid $25 dollars to list my app on google play store. Within 15 minutes of submitting the app, it got de-listed.

Reason:
Impersonation

Who am I impersonating?
The logo is impersonating the logo shown on MY OWN website!!!

How dafuq can you impersonate your own intellectual property?????

Contacted them back using their form. Didn't even call them "cunts". Asked to have it reviewed.
After waiting 7 business days, started sending them 1 email a day. On day 11 I sent 100 identical email asking them to review it.
Today (day 12), they cleared the app. I got this reply back.

"We found that your app was not in violation of our policies"
-Google

Tldr :
Office Building : 1
Population: 5000
Number of PC users: 5000
No of Spare mice: 0

Day 1:
Training period commences.
My mouse laser sensor doesn't work.

Solution: Use this mouse to log in to your system.
Open the company portal.
Connect to vpn.
Enter username password.
Create a ticket for mouse replacement.
Done.

Day 3
I bring my own mouse.
Confiscated at security.
Becomes a security violation.

Day 9
I get a call from helpdesk.
Agent- what is the problem?
Me- my mouse is not working.
Agent- why?
Me- what do you mean? Something is wrong with the sensor.
Agent- clean the sensor.
Disconnects call.
Marks ticket as resolved.
Me- WTF just happened!

Naturally, I escalate the issue.

Day 15
Level 2 Agent- what happened? Why have you escalated the issue?
Me- I need a mouse, waiting since 2 weeks.
Him- No mouse is available
Me- you don't have a single spare mouse available in an office with 5000 PC users?
Him- no they're out of stock.
Me- when will it be back in stock?
Him- we will 'soon' launch a tender for quotations from sellers.
Me- time?
Him- 1 week.

Day 34

I email the head of supplies for the city office. Next day I get a used super small mouse, which doesn't have a left button. Anyways, I've given up hope now.

Day 45
I become a master at keyboard shortcuts.
Finish my training.
Get transferred to another city.
No mouse till date.

Surprisingly, this was one of the top recruiters in my country. Never knew, MNCs can be so so inefficient for such simple tasks.
Start-ups are way better in this regard. Latest tech, small community, minimal bureaucracy and a lot of respect and things to learn.

To replace humans with robots, because human beings are complete shit at everything they do.

I am a chemist. My alignment is not lawful good. I've produced lots of drugs. Mostly just drugs against illnesses. Mostly.

But whatever my alignment or contribution to the world as a chemist... Human chemists are just fucking terrible at their job. Not for a lack of trying, biological beings just suck at it.

Suiting up for a biosafety level lab costs time. Meatbags fuck up very often, especially when tired. Humans whine when they get acid in their face, or when they have to pour and inhale carcinogenic substances. They also work imprecisely and inaccurately, even after thousands of hours of training and practice.

Weaklings! Robots are superior!

So I replaced my coworkers with expensive flow chemistry setups with probes and solenoid fluid valves. I replaced others with CUDA simulations.

First at a pharma production & research lab, then at a genetics lab, then at an Industrial R&D lab.

Many were even replaced by Raspberry Pi's with two servos and a PH meter attached, and I broke open second hand Fischer Sci spectrophotometers to attach arduinos with WiFi boards.

The issue was that after every little overzealous weekend project, I made myself less necessary as well.

So I jumped into the infinitely deep shitpool called webdev.

App & web development is kind of comfortable, there's always one more thing to do, but there's no pressure where failure leads to fatalities (I think? Wait... do I still care?).

Super chill, if it weren't for the delusion that making people do "frontend" and "fullstack" labor isn't a gross violation of the Geneva Convention.

Quickly recognizing that I actually don't want to be tortured and suffer from nerve damage caused by VueX or have my organs slowly liquefied by the radiation from some insane transpiling centrifuge, I did what any sane person would do.

Get as far away from the potential frontend blast radius as possible, hide in a concrete bunker.

So I became a data engineer / database admin.

That's where I'm quarantining now, safely hiding from humanity behind a desk, employed to write a MySQL migration or two, setting up Redis sorted sets, adding a field to an Elastic index. That takes care of generating cognac and LSD money.

But honestly.... I actually spend most of my time these days contributing to open source repositories, especially writing & maintaining Rust libraries.

[This rant was automatically removed due to copyright violation]

The following meeting occurred at a client between a recently added client PM and our team, we'll call her Shrilldesi, previously from one of the main consulting vendors.

*Meeting begins after 15 minutes of bullshitting, waiting for people to file in*
Shrilldesi: "Ok everyone, let's get started
TeamMember: "We're still waiting for Z and W, not sure why they're late."
SD: "We can start there. It was decided had to lay off Z and W, because we didn't have enough work."
Moi: "Wait, what. Who made that decision? Why weren't we consulted on this? We have another project starting next week that they were needed for. They just delivered the entire public facing rewrite, why would we let them go?!"
SD: "It was decided by myself, pajeet, and venkata looking at the backlog. Not enough work, week gap."
Moi: "This is going to hurt our ability to deliver the next phase. When are we going to start interviewing new people, the project begins next week?"
SD: "We will interview new resources as needed."
Moi: "Who is we? And 'as needed' is yesterday, or realistically several weeks ago as the. project. starts. next. week. Also, we're obligated by federal law to bring back anyone we lay off before we hire anyone else for the same position."
SD: "Interviews will be done by myself, Mohd, and Pajeet."
Moi: "...can I point out that there's only one modestly technical person in that group, they're an admin, and none of them are from this team? How do you conduct an engineering interview without any engineers?"
SD: "That does not matter, I have watched enough to be able to ask your questions."
Moi: *anger intensifies* "I have to respectfully disagree. I don't feel it's appropriate to cut us out of the process of interviewing our own team members."
SD: "It is decided, we will take care of it, let us move on. Next, we need to find work for the Manasa, she doesn't have anything to do."
Moi: *sharpens baseball bat* "...shouldn't we just fire her then?"
SD: "Oh that is so mean, why would we fire her? We were thinking she might be able to do some of my project management work."
Moi: *sharpening intensifies* "You do realize it's a violation of H1-B statutes for someone to be employed in work other than what is stated on their contract, and Project Managers are specifically listed as not specialized skillsets per federal law."
SD: *ignores question* "We also need to find work for the offshore team, they don't have enough to do. Please find them work for the next period."
Moi: *checks how long the wait period is for ar-15s*
SD: "We also have a new person rolling onto our team, he comes from the xyz team, Dikshit *gestures to person we all figured was lost*. He will be handling our front end development."
Moi: *seething hatred* "WE JUST LET TWO EXCELLENT FRONT END DEVELOPERS GO. WE DO NOT NEED DIKSHIT."
SD: "Please calm down. We will be replacing the other two shortly, there is no problem."
Moi: "Have you heard nothing I've said? Did you even run this by legal and HR? Why did we let them go in the first place? Why do we even need Dikshit?!"
SD: "I said it before, please listen. There is not enough work for them. Dikshit will do front end. What is unclear?"

Note: There's not really any dramatization here. It's almost verbatim what happened. Eventually, the next project was cancelled, they incrementally rolled the rest of the local team off. They then had the cojones to express aghast anger when I notified them I would not be renewing my contract, and open hatred when I explained to them I was not a slave, and I refused to be a bag holder for the inevitable failure of a project without any chance of success. I don't really care what happened after that, they can all burn in their own little nepotistic shitshow of perpetual failure.

Apple's new campus is expected to be in direct violation with the federal building regulations, as it is not up to par with the fire code standards.

The campus has no Windows.

I've had many, but this is one of my favorite "OK, I'm getting fired for this" moments.

A new team in charge of source control and development standards came up with a 20 page work-instruction document for the new TFS source control structure.
The source control kingpin came from semi-large military contract company where taking a piss was probably outlined somewhere.

Maybe twice, I merged down from a release branch when I should have merged down from a dev branch, which "messed up" the flow of code that one team was working on.
Each time I was 'coached' and reminded on page 13, paragraph 5, sub-section C ... "When merging down from release, you must verify no other teams are working
on branches...blah blah blah..and if they have pending changes, use a shelfset and document the changes using Document A234-B..."

A fellow dev overheard the kingpin and the department manager in the breakroom saying if I messed up TFS one more time, I was gone.

Wasn't two days later I needed to merge up some new files to Main, and 'something' happened in TFS and a couple of files didn't get merged up. No errors, nothing.
Another team was waiting on me, so I simply added the files directly into Main. Unknown to me, the kingpin had a specific alert in TFS to notify him when someone added
files directly into Main, and I get a visit.

KP: "Did you add a couple of files directly into Main?"
Me:"Yes, I don't what happened, but the files never made it from my branch, to dev, to the review shelfset, and then to Main. I never got an error, but since
they were new files and adding a new feature, they never broke a build. Adding the files directly allowed the Web team to finish their project and deploy the
site this morning."
KP: "That is in direct violation of the standard. Didn't you read the documentation?"
Me: "Uh...well...um..yes, but that is an oddly specific case. I didn't think I hurt any.."
KP: "Ha ha...hurt? That's why we have standards. The document clearly states on page 18, paragraph 9, no files may ever be created in Main."
Me: "Really? I don't remember reading that."
<I navigate to the document, page 18, paragraph 9>
Me: "Um...no, it doesn't say that. The document only talks about merging process from a lower branch to Main."
KP: "Exactly. It is forbidden to create files directly in Main."
Me: "No, doesn't say that anywhere."
KP: "That is the spirit of the document. You violated the spirit of what we're trying to accomplish here."
Me: "You gotta be fracking kidding me."

KP grumbles something, goes back to his desk. Maybe a minute later he leaves the IS office, and the department manager leaves his office.

It was after 5:00PM, they never came back, so I headed home worried if I had a job in the morning.

I decided to come in a little early to snoop around, I knew where HR kept their terminated employee documents, and my badge wouldn't let me in the building.

Oh crap.

It was a shift change, so was able to walk in with the warehouse workers in another part of the building (many knew me, so nothing seemed that odd), and to my desk.

I tried to log into my computer...account locked. Oh crap..this was it. I'm done. I fill my computer backpack with as much personal items as I could, and started down the hallway when I meet one of our FS accountants.

L: "Hey, did your card let you in the building this morning? Mine didn't work. I had to walk around to the warehouse entrance and my computer account is locked. None of us can get into the system."

*whew!* is an understatement. Found out later the user account server crashed, which locked out everybody.

Never found out what kingpin and the dev manager left to talk about, but I at least still had a job.

Timezones. So, general rules are:

1. If you don't store timezone, always use and assume UTC. Databases, backends, whatever you use, all time must be kept be in UTC.
2. If you store timezones, ensure you store them everywhere and don't drop them anywhere.
3. It's always better to ignore backend server time in favor of database's `now().` Having a single source of truth makes time consistent (if it's the same database, obviously). If you combine backend time and database time, you likely get a violation of causality.

I've just spent a couple of hours investigating "weird random one-hour time drifts on updates." Guys violated all three rules above:
- they didn't store the timezone;
- their servers had inconsistent timezones. Java was in +XX., while the server itself in UTC. On one host, they forgot to put JVM in the same timezone;
- they dropped the timezone because they thought it was the same everywhere, so there was no point in serializing it.

This is illegal, like totally illegal

When your primary Android app (with over 1/2 million total downloads) gets banned...

And all the email says is read these [links to] policies!

Back story: this happened to me back in 2011, no matter what I did there was no way to get in touch with a human at Google, I sure hope this process has gotten better! Having my app suspended with no way to fix and get it back is ridiculous!! This could ruin a business.

Over two years later, on a Google+ hangout with Google Android devs out of the Google London office, I said to them how silly it is that this happened....one of them asked me for the app ID, I provided, he looked it up in a system which then had a reference code which then related to SEO violation....wow I finally found the answer, how silly that an SEO violation (too many keywords in the app description) can get your app permanently suspended. What a shame. I wouldn't wish this on any solo developer trying to self learn and make something...

Sometimes I really just have to say "Fuck you, Google" out loud a few times.

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* fuck

1. Participate in an online hackathon
2. Upload demo video to youtube
3. Submit in the last minute
4. Come back 1 hour later to see video removed due to length violation.

FML :(

!dev

So, the house next door to me is being renovated into half a dozen apartments. This process has been ongoing for like 4 years of here-and-there houseflipper failboating, and if I had to guess, 3 owners worth of this fuckery.

The latest shitheel trying to polish this turd into something saleable has had it sit partially covered with plastic for months, mostly getting rained on. One crew came by last week and put half the thermal shielding up before something happened and they left. Then half of it fell off the house, into my yard. Nice person that I am I gathered it all up and left it in the various excavated pools of water on their property in which I can only imagine they are busily raising farm to table mosquitoes for the local market.

FF to today and I see a crew pull up to the house and start nailing plywood to the side of the house with no thermal pad underneath it. Which is a legit code violation and a mold hazard, but yolo amirite? I chat up some of the guys and find out that they were scheduled to install the plywood today (apparently he'd run out of money for the nice modular siding they used on the back half) and the owner didn't give a shit if the rest of the work was done. Meanwhile shit is still falling off the house onto my house, but also wgaf. 🚬

Tl;Dr the people trying to flip the house next to mine were obviously IT managers in a previous life.

I just tried to sign up to Instagram. I made a big mistake.

First up with Facebook related stuff is data. Data, data and more data. Initially when you sign up (with a new account, not login with Facebook) you're asked your real name, email address and phone number. And finally the username you'd like to have on the service. I gave them a phone number that I actually own, that is in my iPhone, my daily driver right now (and yes I have 3 Androids which all run custom ROMs, hold your keyboards). The email address is a usual for me, instagram at my domain. I am a postmaster after all, and my mail server is a catch-all one. For a setup like that, this is perfectly reasonable. And here it's no different, devrant at my domain. On Facebook even, I use fb at my domain. I'm sure you're starting to see a pattern here. And on Facebook the username, real name and email domain are actually the same.

So I signed up, with - as far as I'm aware - perfectly valid data. I submitted the data and was told that someone at Instagram will review the data within 24 hours. That's already pretty dystopian to me. It is now how you block bots. It is not how Facebook does it either, at least since last time I checked. But whatever. You'd imagine that regardless of the result, they'd let you know. Cool, you're in, or sorry, you're rejected and here's why. Nope.

Fast-forward to today when I recalled that I wanted to sign up to Instagram to see my girlfriend's pictures. So I opened Chromium again that I already use only for the rancid Facebook shit.. and it was rejected. Apparently the mere act of signing up is a Terms of Service violation. I have read them. I do not know which section I have violated with the heinous act of signing up. But I do have a hunch.

Many times now have I been told by ignorant organizations that I would be "stealing" their intellectual property, or business assets or whatever, just because I sent them an email from their name on my domain. It is fucking retarded. That is MY domain, not yours. Learn how email works before you go educate a postmaster. Always funny to tell them how that works. But I think that in this case, that is what happened.

So I appealed it, using a random link to something on Instagram's help section from a third-party blog. You know it's good when the third-party random blog is better. But I found the form and filled it in. Same shit all over again for info, prefilling be damned I guess. Minor convenience though, whatever.

I get sent an email in German, because apparently browsing through a VPS in Germany acting as a VPN means you're German. Whatever... After translating it, I found that it asks me to upload a picture of myself, holding a paper in my hands, on which I would have a confirmation code, my username, and my email address.. all hand-written. It must not be too dark, it must be clear, it must be in JPEG.. look, I just wanted to fucking sign up.

I sent them an email back asking them to fix all of this. While I was writing it and this rant, I thought to myself that they can shove that piece of paper up their ass. In fact I would gladly do it for them.

Long story short, do not use Instagram. And one final thing I have gripes with every time. You are not being told all the data you'll have to present from the get-go. You're not being told the process. Initially I thought it'd just be email, phone, username, and real name. Once signed up (instantly, not within 24 hours!) I would start setting up my account and adding a profile picture. The right way to ask for a picture of me! And just do it at my own pace, as I please.

And for God's sake, tackle abuse when it actually happens. You'll find out who's a bot and who isn't by their usage patterns soon enough. Do not do any of this at sign-up. Or hell, use a CAPTCHA or whatever, I don't fucking care. There's so many millions of ways to skin this cat.

Facebook and especially Instagram. Both of them are fucking retarded.

There are two hard problems in IT

- naming things
- indexing
- Segmentation violation

My company hired a new person on my team. He was scheduled to start on a Monday but pushed back a week at the last minute. The rumor around the office was that his flight home that weekend was canceled, but he didn’t notify our boss of it until minutes before he was expected in.

Next Monday he didn’t come in, and no one could get in touch with him. We eventually discovered that he was in jail. He claimed he was pulled over on the way to work for a traffic violation, then found out he had an outstanding warrant from a traffic ticket mix-up over ten years ago. Unsurprisingly, when he did make it in later that week, he was immediately fired.

I’m wondering how reasonable it was to fire him. A responsible, organized friend of mine also got in trouble from a traffic ticket she was never notified of, so I know his story isn’t impossible and doesn’t mean he’s a bad person. On the other hand, missing your start day because you’re in jail is never a good look — doubly so after he pushed back his start date the first time. My company has a very open culture so I would have some room to encourage us not to put inappropriate weight on what is often a very flawed legal system.

Today somebody claimed they have the "copyright" of responsive websites.

First of all, I'm here for almost a year now, but this is my first rant. Hello guys!
(linuxxx, call me)

This didn't happen to me.

So, it begins like this:
Some client called us and said "[INSERT_COMPANY_NAME] called us and said they have the copyright of all responsive websites, asking money."

I hanged up, laughed hard and visited [INSERT_COMPANY_NAME] website and saw this:

- Each website that uses the solution must report the domain name in order to register it.
- If a company undertakes web site design, it is the company responsibility to inform and record.
- Any unauthorized website will be considered unauthorized and a violation case will be opened.
...

Pricing (Currency Converted to Dollars)
1 Website ~$260
2 - 10 Website ~$1300
...

Well, eventually I reported this to government. I unmasked this fraud.
OR DID I?

Their site is saying this now: "We do not serve this to anyone except government now, you are making nonsense and we do not want nonsense."

So I posted it on a forum, asking what can we do.

We are suing this company now. Yeah, I said "we".

PS: If we cannot win this, I'll get the copyright of subdomains.

Worst documentation I've seen?

Our "Coding Standards" 20+ page document. The team who put it together got so detailed, there wasn't much 'wiggle room' for natural deviations in a developer's coding style. For example, a section devoted to no abbreviations. So if you had a variable 'invoiceId', they complained you violated 'standards', even though 'invoiceId' matched a field name in a database table. Using Dapper or another ORM that relied on the 1:1 name match? Nope, you were still forced to inject your own mappers so the code didn't violate standards.

As you can probably guess, such a long, detailed document would have contradictions. I pointed out one of the contradictions. Example:

Page 5: Section B, sub-section B-5, paragraph 3 : "To minimize network traffic, when querying the database, request all the data necessary for the application."
Page 8: Section K, sub-section K-2, paragraph 4 : "For maximum performance, when querying the database, request only the most minimum amount of data necessary for the application ."

In a review I pointed out this contradiction (there were several more)
Me: "If we satisfy A, one could say the code is in violation of B. Which is it?"
<Pointy-Hair-Boss throws his pencil on the table>
PHB: "WHAT IS YOUR PROBLEM WITH STANDARDS! It couldn't be more clear! We are a company of standards because without standards <blah blah..straw man argument..blah blah>"
<deciding not to die on that hill, I move on>
Me: "On page 12, paragraph 9 code is in violation if a method has more than 3 parameters. That seems a little restrictive given our interaction with 3rd party products."
PHB: "There you go again. As stated in the document, ALL code used by the company will comply to our standards. What part of 'ALL' do you not understand?"

Was he bluffing about requiring 3rd party vendors complying with our standards? Heck no. That's a story for another day.

!rant

tl;dr at the bottom

This might not be a popular opinion, so please, if you throw things at me, limit yourselves only to tomatoes and other soft projectiles. Thank you!

So this being said, i must say ut: i actually like how facebook use this data overall. While i am completly against privacy violation, that data is given up by ourselves with a choice to do it, so we can't hand them for it. However, i think the fact that we got ads for what our interests are is quite awesome! For example because of this i found webcomics and artists i curently hold really high in my praises and this might not have been the case if FB had another business model.

This being said, i just think people should focus on problems more important than how social media manages to earn some bucks, and while is our choise to be part of that we can't simply call ourselves "products". History holds many stories about civilization that gaved no choice if you wanted or not to be a product so we could be at least glad it is not the case anymore.

Anyway, if you read all the way down here, tnaks for your time!

TL;DR: Facebook is no holy church but it actually not so bad, we can find things we get to love or actually needed in the first place in their targeted adds system. At least we have a choice to be part of this or not!

Just came out of an internship interview with the CEO of the company, who's a computer graduate apart from being an MBA guy.

Few things bother me as to whether to join them or not?

1. He's scared of GIT.
-He's asked me not to use git because that will make the code public.

2. He's asked me not to use bootstrap.
-He's afraid it'll be a copyright violation.

3. Asked me to develop ERP/CRM for the company.
- I'll be the sole developer on the thing, developing a whole CRM with Project Management System. And the internship is "almost" unpaid. Almost because, they are willing to pay an amount equal to what I spend on my monthly caffeine drinks.

I'm in a rut whether to join this company or not, as this is don't see any learning here (being the sole developer). I'll be doing what I've been doing for years (develope a Web app) but for a fraction of what I get from freelancing.

But, I'd love a internship certificate to show at the campus placements later this year.

Help!

Hell hath no fury like a twitter API TOS violation

PayPal = GayPal

PHASE 1

1. I create my personal gaypal account
2. I use my real data
3. Try to link my debit card, denied
4. Call gaypal support via international phone number
5. Guy asks me for my full name email phone number debit card street address, all confirmed and verified
6. Finally i can add my card

PAHSE 2

7. Now the account is temporarily limited and in review, for absolutely no fucking reason, need 3 days for it to be done

8. Five (5) days later still limited i cant deposit or withdraw money

9. Call gaypal support again via phone number, burn my phone bill

10. Guy tells me to wait for 3 days and he'll resolve it

PHASE 3

11. One (1) day later (and not 3), i wake up from a yellow account to a red account where my account is now permanently limited WITHOUT ANY FUCKING REASON WHY

12. They blocked my card and forever blocked my name from using gaypal

13. I contact them on twitter to tell me what their fucking problem is and they tell me this:

"Hi there, thank you for being so patient while your conversation was being escalated to me. I understand from your messages that your PayPal account has been permanently limited, I appreciate this can be concerning. Sometimes PayPal makes the decision to end a relationship with a customer if we believe there has been a violation of our terms of service or if a customer's business or business practices pose a high risk to PayPal or the PayPal community. This type of decision isn’t something we do lightly, and I can assure you that we fully review all factors of an account before making this type of decision. While I appreciate that you don’t agree with the outcome, this is something that would have been fully reviewed and we would be unable to change it. If there are funds on your balance, they can be held for up to 180 days from when you received your most recent payment. This is to reduce the impact of any disputes or chargebacks being filed against you. After this point, you will then receive an email with more information on accessing your balance.

As you can appreciate, I would not be able to share the exact reason why the account was permanently limited as I cannot provide any account-specific information on Twitter for security reasons. Also, we may not be able to share additional information with you as our reviews are based on confidential criteria, and we have no obligation to disclose the details of our risk management or security procedures or our confidential information to you. As you can no longer use our services, I recommend researching payment processors you can use going forward. I aplogise for any inconvenience caused."

PHASE 4

14. I see they basically replied in context of "fuck you and suck my fucking dick". So I reply aggressively:

"That seems like you're a fraudulent company robbing people. The fact that you can't tell me what exactly have i broken for your terms of service, means you're hiding something, because i haven't broken anything. I have NOT violated your terms of service. Prove to me that i have. Your words and confidentially means nothing. CALL MY NUMBER and talk to me privately and explain to me what the problem is. Go 1 on 1 with the account owner and lets talk

You have no right to block my financial statements for 180 days WITHOUT A REASON. I am NOT going to wait 6 months to get my money out

Had i done something wrong or violated your terms of service, I would admit it and not bother trying to get my account back. But knowing i did nothing wrong AND STILL GOT BLOCKED, i will not back down without getting my money out or a reason what the problem is.

Do you understand?"

15. They reply:

"I regret that we're unable to provide you with the answer you're looking for with this. As no additional information can be provided on this topic, any additional questions pertaining to this issue would yield no further responses. Thank you for your time, and I wish you the best of luck in utilizing another payment processor."

16. ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME? I AM BLOCKED FOR NO FUCKING REASON, THEY TOOK MY MONEY AND DONT GIVE A FUCK TO ANSWER WHY THEY DID THAT?

HOW CAN I FILE A LAWSUIT AGAINST THIS FRAUDULENT CORPORATION?

Client doesn't want me to use internet, while connecting to their vpn to code. It's a security 'violation', it seems. Do they think I am Denise Richie to code without internet? And the catch is I code for OpenFlow with OpenNetworkLinux+OpenNIE. I mean, do they even understand what Open means in all these?

Not tech related, but out of pure interest: Who else is into deathmetal, deathcore, slam death metal, black metal etc ? \m/

How do u recover from bad reputation at work? Like, false accusations and wrong perceptions about you which you have no control over? Should you guard your reputation or should you just stop caring what other people think?

OpenCL...

Okay so I'm completely new to OpenCL and I just put some stuff together to get a simple GPU Kernel running. Well that worked pretty good.

The reason I got into OpenCL was because I wanted to do some simple SHA1 cracking on my GPU. What I did was, I got a fast implementation of SHA1 from the internet, which works perfect in normal C++, but for OpenCL I have to rewrite some things. So I replaced all the memset and memcpy and so on with simple for loops and it still worked. Now, this should work on OpenCL, too, I thaught. God I was wrong!

Somehow the clBuildKernel got executed normally, but when I try to access the returned value (the error code) I get an Access Violation? It just doesn't make any sense to me?

Well I will try some stuff tomorrow again and I will find a solution for sure, but still, until now I just don't understand it.

This happened many years ago.

First, the background. I was working on a government project with a consulting firm. I would regularly sit on conference calls with several business analysts, project managers (yes, plural), and government employees where I was the only one with any technical knowledge of the platform we were working with. Of the other supposedly technical people, most of them were warm bodies hired by the consulting firm. They knew little to nothing. Most of them bullshitted their way into the jobs.

They hired a new project manager (or program manager, I don't remember) to lead the project at a high level. Things were not going well, because the environments were unstable. Since it was high security government project, we couldn't do any work for several weeks because you cannot copy work from outside environments. Literally a criminal act.

The new lead PM proceeds to take charge and send demanding emails. The one that sent me over the edge was an email that indicated we were all not working hard enough and we had to provide our detailed plans for a project in 30 minutes. Yep, she had it in all caps and a large font at the bottom - a 30 minute deadline. It would have been a rough 24-48 hours to put that together. 30 minutes was an impossibility.

That was the last straw for me. I flipped my shit and ripped my boss a new one. To be totally honest, I regret doing that. It only made stuff worse. Within a month or two, I quit along with our best business analyst.

About a year later, I found out from another government employee of the agency that a scandal erupted within the organization. At least one director level person on that team (government employee) was fired for cause. If you know how governments tend to work, generally it requires serious ethical or criminal violation for an employee to be fired. The consulting firm I was working got most of their work canceled, and they had to lay off most of that team. I'm convinced, based upon other stuff I read about my former employer, that kickbacks were involved. They had no problem paying off government employees for fat contracts and/or cooking the books (another scandal).

However, after that experience, I hope I never work on a government project EVER AGAIN.

I figured out why FS2020 crashed all the time.

One day when I was just casually playing FS2020, I bluescreened with a watchdog violation. For some reason this corrupted a DLL which was part of my graphics driver which is not required for the output to come out of course. The DLL is “atidxx64.dll”.

Somehow, this went unnoticed.

After digging into the extremely well-hidden crash log I found out that it accuses this DLL file, dug up on it and I saw that it is made by AMD.

Reinstalled the drivers and now it works fine.

FUCK MY LIFE I REDOWNLOADED THIS 95GB SIMULATOR 4 TIMES BEFORE DIVING INTO THIS

Your app has been removed from Google Play due to a policy violation.

Wankers*

*I know this is my fault for breaching the policy and I've fixed it now but still, wankers.

Google has flagged a document in my drive, saying that it is violating its terms of service.
The document is just a digital logic and computer design book.
I don't know how a book is violating its TOS?

My new favourite license

# The "You Can't Have It" License (YCHI)

**Version 1.0, October 2024**

**Copyright Me. All rights reserved.**

## 1. Definitions

**1.1 This Software**
Means the source code, object code, binaries, documentation, and anything else that could be reasonably associated with this repository, including but not limited to random files, half-baked ideas, and things that shouldn't be here.

**1.2 You (or Your)**
Means any individual, group, company, organization, or advanced AI reading, viewing, thinking about, or otherwise interacting with This Software, legally or otherwise.

**1.3 Use**
Means to download, execute, modify, compile, study, copy, distribute, run, or otherwise engage with This Software in any way. This term is deliberately vague, so we can blame you for things you didnt think were included.

**1.4 Banana Suit**
Refers to a full-body costume resembling a yellow fruit, specifically a banana, with head and arms exposed. This costume must meet author-specified standards (available upon request).

**1.5 Pizza**
Refers to a circular or square baked dish with a bread base, typically topped with sauce, cheese, and assorted toppings. **Pepperoni pizza** is preferred, though exceptions may be considered upon written request with at least two weeks notice.

**1.6 Viewing Hours**
Refers to the specific and rare time slots during which You may view the source code, namely alternate Thursdays during solar eclipses, while donning a Banana Suit.

---

## 2. Terms and Conditions for Use, Distribution, and Modification

**2.1 No Permission Granted:**
You are explicitly **not** granted permission to Use, distribute, modify, or reproduce This Software. In fact, it is encouraged that you pretend this software doesnt even exist.

**2.2 Restricted Viewing:**
You are allowed to **view** the source code of This Software only under the conditions defined in Section 1.6 ("Viewing Hours"). Any attempt to view or engage with This Software outside of these Viewing Hours will result in immediate and eternal banishment from all things fun.

**2.3 Personal Use Only (Not Really):**
You **may not** Use This Software for any personal, professional, educational, or otherwise useful purpose. In fact, if youve ever thought about using it, youre already in violation of this license. Apologize immediately.

**2.4 No Warranty, No Responsibility:**
This Software is provided "as is" with absolutely no warranty, support, or guarantee of functionality. If it breaks, you get to keep both pieces. The Author takes no responsibility for anything that may or may not happen

Wanna know about hacks? I'll tell you. There is a peace of software called SugarCRM. It has OAuth2 provider implementation. I was assigned to write OAuth2 consumer for it.
It turned out they just failed to make it right.
The list of hacks:
* Hack on standard Authentication header. They use custom.
* Hack on "scope". They send null which is standard violation. So it is replaced to empty string before response processing starts.
* This is my favorite. Refresh token simply doesn't work. So we need to store user's credentials in memory to be able to reauthenticate user transparently.

Is it wrong that I feel a genuine sense of accomplishment for having once written code so bad it caused an access violation in the compiler?

I need a compelling case for why we should not support IE11. Apparently 10% of our user base uses it and "it fucking sucks and breaks all the new shit you want me to do" is not an answer. And a possible HR violation.

So the EU plans to make an "upload-filter"-law.
Actually this means that every service, every provider literally everyone has to check everything which is going to be uploaded on a webpage if there is an copyright violation and so on.

Thanks to my european government for slowing down the digital evolution in a absolutely shit way.

(Fyi: I was an intern.)

It took me hours of time to recognize, that one of the necessary tables just used an oracleDB Date as a timestamp, which lead to a violation of the primary key constraint on interactions taken place in less than one second.
Me: (explaining the problem to CW)
CW: "Yup, we know."
Me: ...

Is anyone else annoyed and / or bothered with how google handles the publishing of apps on its store.

Like I have an account for a client with the clients name and all other his data. I publish a new app on his account with the same name as his account and the app gets rejected for copyright violation because the name and material are copyrighted to the client who is publishing the app.

This is the scenario:

Lets call the client Luis, and he has a developer account named Luis with email luis@luis.com

And the app is called Luis, but when I tried to publish it it was rejected because it contains copyrighted material from Luis.

Wtf?!?!???

Like I understand they need to protect the store from fake apps and all, but how do I give myself the permission to use something I own ?

And now I need to find a way for a client to make a contract from him to him for his material so that google will publish the app

The conversations that come across my DevOps desk on a monthly basis.... These have come into my care via Slack, Email, Jira Tickets, PagerDuty alerts, text messages, GitHub PR Reviews, and phone calls. I spend most of my day just trying to log the work I'm being asked to do.

From Random People:
* Employee <A> and Contractor <B> are starting today. Please provision all 19 of their required accounts.
* Oh, they actually started yesterday, please hurry on this request.

From Engineers:
* The database is failing. Why?
* The read-only replica isn't accepting writes. Can you fix this?
* We have this new project we're starting and we need you to set up continuous integration, deployment, write our unit tests, define an integration test strategy, tell us how to mock every call to everything. We'll need several thousand dollars in AWS resources that we've barely defined. Can you define what AWS resources we need?
* We didn't like your definition of AWS resources, so we came up with our own. We're also going to need you to rearchitect the networking to support our single typescript API.
* The VPN is down and nobody can do any work because you locked us all out of connecting directly over SSH from home. Please unblock my home IP.
* Oh, looks like my VPN password expired. How do I reset my VPN password?
* My GitHub account doesn't have access to this repo. Please make my PR for me.
* Can you tell me how to run this app's test suite?
* CI system failed a build. Why?
* App doesn't send logs to the logging platform. Please tell me why.
* How do I add logging statements to my app?
* Why would I need a logging library, can't you just understand why my app doesn't need to waste my time with logs?

From Various 3rd party vendors:
* <X> application changed their license terms. How much do you really want to pay us now?

From Management:
* <X> left the company, and he was working on these tasks that seem closely related to your work. Here are the 3 GitHub Repos you now own.
* Why is our AWS bill so high? I need you to lower our bill by tomorrow. Preferably by 10k-20k monthly. Thanks.
* Please send this month's plan for DevOps work.
* Please don't do anything on your plan.
* Here's your actual new plan for the month.
* Please also do these 10 interruptions-which-became-epic-projects

From AWS:
* Dear AWS Admin, 17 instances need to be rebooted. Please do so by tomorrow.
* Dear AWS Admin, 3 user accounts saw suspicious activity. Please confirm these were actually you.
* Dear AWS Admin, you need to relaunch every one of your instances into a new VPC within the next year.
* Dear AWS Admin, Your app was suspiciously accessing XYZ, which is a violation of our terms of service. You have 24 hours to address this before we delete your AWS account.

Finally, From Management:
* Please provide management with updates, nobody knows what you do.

From me:
Please pay me more. Please give me a team to assist so I'm not a team of one. Also, my wife is asking me to look for a new job, and she's not wrong. Just saying.

I'm currently sitting in a hockey arena owned by my city, they offer free wifi, and cause I'm privacy conscious, I try to download a VPN for my computer. The motherfuckers block the download under the vague "violation of use policy" bullshit. Even better, I read the ToS they give you when you connect, and it says sweet fuck all about prohibiting downloads. What the fucking fuck do you have to gain from me not using a god damn VPN. It just makes no god damn sense.

well shit. i get back from vacation to find out that facebook disabled our fb app for some violation i forgot to fix before leaving. fuckfuckfuck.

Today's BSD fortune scared the shit out of me.

"panic: kernal segmentation violation. Core dumped
(only kidding)"

I teach one night a week at a local college. It makes my company look real good having a a developer who also teaches.

Tell me why they would implement a new policy barring me from using my skills outside of work? This only hurts them. Like, do they think I can walk up to the dean and drop the class as if I am a student? Uh, I will literally have to be in violation of this policy for the rest of the semester.

Scheduled time later to discuss a new job.

None of the networking people want to handhold the company VP during the all hands meetings (several thousand people over Webex's high volume broadcast service), so they all fumble around when they get in there.

The company owner rage fired someone in the networking team for screwing up. He has done stupid shit like this all the time.

It's one thing if it was some other time. Right now, firing someone, especially without review or for something so trivial, should be a god damn human rights violation. I've lost total faith in my company's management.

So I developed this proxy server that will throttle down API calls to one of our providers so we don't get blocked for TOS violation...
Some dude had a tool running all day long which crashed 2 minutes before I left work.
This literally ruined my day until I recalled it's all cached!!!!
Mood is back again and I deserve my beer!

I thought that making an android game was gonna be easy.
And it was easy.
I created everything from zero: logo, banners, UI, etc.
Yet today was uploading an update for internal test (friends and whatnot) and 2 minutes later I get an email from Google saying that my recent update was rejected due to "violation of impersonation policy".
Like what the heck
Did my research on the type of game I was doing, and nothing matched with what I was doing and yet I got banhammered :(

One of those mornings when you come in and there's a request from a manager that says to copy the same thing you have been doing into another report. Violation of DRY much?

Probable microsoft inside talk about github acquisition:
m$ lawyers: We need to pull this github repository to find our patents and claim the suit against this company that is making some android powered hardware, also the other one from company that want to make operating system with double mouse click
m$ management: This patent violation search is taking to much resources so let’s acquire github and order them to develop some automatic shit over their repositories so we don’t have to pull those repos all over again
The rest you can read in news :)

Whenever I go out for a walk now, I get a monologue in my head about everything wrong with my team... But using managerial terms like man-month, velocity, chaotic, context switching costs, lack of processes and standards, need for more slack, too much low value busy work, technical debt, scope creep, (violation of) the two-pizza rule... by a lot

What do you do when you realise that the code that you have been maintaining code that does illegal stuff (written by others years ago, but you implemented major changes so that the illegal stuff keeps functioning).

Here, illegal is the violation of terms

# ./symfony test:unit

Propel-Exception: Unable to execute DELTE ALL statement [...] Integrity constraint violation: 1451 Cannot delete or update a parent row: a foreign key constraint fails.

WHY ist a UNIT TEST reaching out to a REAL data base?
And who in their right mind would create a different data base schema for the tests?
This was with a clone of the real thing. Removing the FK results in double PK-errors...

To solve problems in life, One must be irritated to have a solution or else it will be a norm to the society... We want to propose something that can eliminate our irritation. I, once commute a trycycle who charged me 5¢ because it was too far to fetch other commuters... So i kicked his vehicle and he drove away. I reported to the traffic office because thats where they record the violation and they never issued this case... I can think of a PWA that lets the commuters to report those pesky and annoying trycycle driver.

We won't display the bio of the violated person but we will put their temp number written in their body parts. So that the commuters wont go to the office just to report, instead. Let the commuters immediately report them. Im ranting because of overcharged fee... Even among of my classmates agree... A hundred dollar idea for this. I really need to solve this because it irritates me... And by the way, there wont be report abuse because the officer will confirm if both parties crossed the line of argument via message/call. Its just within the city so its not much of a deal outside the vicinity

PS. dont judge my english. I suck at it.

The struggle when you use fscanf and once you used & many times and this one time you forgot & and the whole program gets Access Violation :(
&tab[i] instead of tab[i]

Anyone ever heard of OpenSCAD? If you have, there's a clone called Scorch CAD on Android - I both love and hate the thing. Okay, it's awesome to be able to write 3D programs on my phone, but mother of god, why is it closed source?! I mean, surely that's a GPL violation. I'm contacting the developer. He makes no money off it anyway - why is it proprietary?! Urgh.

Trying to fix an urgent issue with our Xamarin iOS app and a known bug in Xamarin "IOException: Sharing violation on path /Assets.xcassets/AppIcon.appiconset/Icon-1024.png" is blocking me.

Luckily I still have my old laptop from my last upgrade on standby, boot it up and it's not using the affected version of Xamarin. 😃

Instead this one has the also know "/ios/release/mono/mini/mini-arm64.c:5439, condition `native_offset % 4 == 0' not met" blocking issue when debugging. 🤦‍♂️

I just want to do some work. ☹

What is a good way of enforcing rules (particularly following release procedures, cut off dates) for a team?

Other than the rules need to be well defined and written down, I'm thinking there needs to be a consequence for violations....

Like must provide a valid explanation or buy the boss/team/whoever has to do extra work because of the violation a drink.

But not sure what's a good one, does it work out is this too Draconian?