Join devRant
Do all the things like
++ or -- rants, post your own rants, comment on others' rants and build your customized dev avatar
Sign Up
Pipeless API
![](/static/devrant/img/pipeless-devrant-banner-white.png)
From the creators of devRant, Pipeless lets you power real-time personalized recommendations and activity feeds using a simple API
Learn More
Search - "windows archive"
-
Oh, man, I just realized I haven't ranted one of my best stories on here!
So, here goes!
A few years back the company I work for was contacted by an older client regarding a new project.
The guy was now pitching to build the website for the Parliament of another country (not gonna name it, NDAs and stuff), and was planning on outsourcing the development, as he had no team and he was only aiming on taking care of the client service/project management side of the project.
Out of principle (and also to preserve our mental integrity), we have purposely avoided working with government bodies of any kind, in any country, but he was a friend of our CEO and pleaded until we singed on board.
Now, the project itself was way bigger than we expected, as the wanted more of an internal CRM, centralized document archive, event management, internal planning, multiple interfaced, role based access restricted monster of an administration interface, complete with regular user website, also packed with all kind of features, dashboards and so on.
Long story short, a lot bigger than what we were expecting based on the initial brief.
The development period was hell. New features were coming in on a weekly basis. Already implemented functionality was constantly being changed or redefined. No requests we ever made about clarifications and/or materials or information were ever answered on time.
They also somehow bullied the guy that brought us the project into also including the data migration from the old website into the new one we were building and we somehow ended up having to extract meaningful, formatted, sanitized content parsing static HTML files and connecting them to download-able files (almost every page in the old website had files available to download) we needed to also include in a sane way.
Now, don't think the files were simple URL paths we can trace to a folder/file path, oh no!!! The links were some form of hash combination that had to be exploded and tested against some king of database relationship tables that only had hashed indexes relating to other tables, that also only had hashed indexes relating to some other tables that kept a database of the website pages HTML file naming. So what we had to do is identify the files based on a combination of hashed indexes and re-hashed HTML file names that in the end would give us a filename for a real file that we had to then search for inside a list of over 20 folders not related to one another.
So we did this. Created a script that processed the hell out of over 10000 HTML files, database entries and files and re-indexed and re-named all this shit into a meaningful database of sane data and well organized files.
So, with this we were nearing the finish line for the project, which by now exceeded the estimated time by over to times.
We test everything, retest it all again for good measure, pack everything up for deployment, simulate on a staging environment, give the final client access to the staging version, get them to accept that all requirements are met, finish writing the documentation for the codebase, write detailed deployment procedure, include some automation and testing tools also for good measure, recommend production setup, hardware specs, software versions, server side optimization like caching, load balancing and all that we could think would ever be useful, all with more documentation and instructions.
As the project was built on PHP/MySQL (as requested), we recommended a Linux environment for production. Oh, I forgot to tell you that over the development period they kept asking us to also include steps for Windows procedures along with our regular documentation. Was a bit strange, but we added it in there just so we can finish and close the damn project.
So, we send them all the above and go get drunk as fuck in celebration of getting rid of them once and for all...
Next day: hung over, I get to the office, open my laptop and see on new email. I only had the one new mail, so I open it to see what it's about.
Lo and behold! The fuckers over in the other country that called themselves "IT guys", and were the ones making all the changes and additions to our requirements, were not capable enough to follow step by step instructions in order to deploy the project on their servers!!!
[Continues in the comments]26 -
this.title = "gg Microsoft"
this.metadata = {
rant: true,
long: true,
super_long: true,
has_summary: true
}
// Also:
let microsoft = "dead" // please?
tl;dr: Windows' MAX_PATH is the devil, and it basically does not allow you to copy files with paths that exceed this length. No matter what. Even with official fixes and workarounds.
Long story:
So, I haven't had actual gainful employ in quite awhile. I've been earning just enough to get behind on bills and go without all but basic groceries. Because of this, our electronics have been ... in need of upgrading for quite awhile. In particular, we've needed new drives. (We've been down a server for two years now because its drive died!)
Anyway, I originally bought my external drive just for backup, but due to the above, I eventually began using it for everyday things. including Steam. over USB. Terrible, right? So, I decided to mount it as an internal drive to lower the read/write times. Finding SATA cables was difficult, the motherboard's SATA plugs are in a terrible spot, and my tiny case (and 2yo) made everything soo much worse. It was a miserable experience, but I finally got it installed.
However! It turns out the Seagate external drives use some custom drive header, or custom driver to access the drive, so Windows couldn't read the bare drive. ffs. So, I took it out again (joy) and put it back in the enclosure, and began copying the files off.
The drive I'm copying it to is smaller, so I enabled compression to allow storing a bit more of the data, and excluded a couple of directories so I could copy those elsewhere. I (barely) managed to fit everything with some pretty tight shuffling.
but. that external drive is connected via USB, remember? and for some reason, even over USB3, I was only getting ~20mb/s transfer rate, so the process took 20some hours! In the interim, I worked on some projects, watched netflix, etc., then locked my computer, and went to bed. (I also made sure to turn my monitors and keyboard light off so it wouldn't be enticing to my 2yo.) Cue dramatic music ~
Come morning, I go to check on the progress... and find that the computer is off! What the hell! I turn it on and check the logs... and found that it lost power around 9:16am. aslkjdfhaslkjashdasfjhasd. My 2yo had apparently been playing with the power strip and its enticing glowing red on/off switch. So. It didn't finish copying.
aslkjdfhaslkjashdasfjhasd x2
Anyway, finding the missing files was easy, but what about any that didn't finish? Filesizes don't match, so writing a script to check doesn't work. and using a visual utility like windirstat won't work either because of the excluded folders. Friggin' hell.
Also -- and rather the point of this rant:
It turns out that some of the files (70 in total, as I eventually found out) have paths exceeding Windows' MAX_PATH length (260 chars). So I couldn't copy those.
After some research, I learned that there's a Microsoft hotfix that patches this specific issue! for my specific version! woo! It's like. totally perfect. So, I installed that, restarted as per its wishes... tried again (via both drag and `copy`)... and Lo! It did not work.
After installing the hotfix. to fix this specific issue. on my specific os. the issue remained. gg Microsoft?
Further research.
I then learned (well, learned more about) the unicode path prefix `\\?\`, which bypasses Windows kernel's path parsing, and passes the path directly to ntfslib, thereby indirectly allowing ~32k path lengths. I tried this with the native `copy` command; no luck. I tried this with `robocopy` and cygwin's `cp`; they likewise failed. I tried it with cygwin's `rsync`, but it sees `\\?\` as denoting a remote path, and therefore fails.
However, `dir \\?\C:\` works just fine?
So, apparently, Microsoft's own workaround for long pathnames doesn't work with its own utilities. unless the paths are shorter than MAX_PATH? gg Microsoft.
At this point, I was sorely tempted to write my own copy utility that calls the internal Windows APIs that support unicode paths. but as I lack a C compiler, and haven't coded in C in like 15 years, I figured I'd try a few last desperate ideas first.
For the hell of it, I tried making an archive of the offending files with winRAR. Unsurprisingly, it failed to access the files.
... and for completeness's sake -- mostly to say I tried it -- I did the same with 7zip. I took one of the offending files and made a 7z archive of it in the destination folder -- and, much to my surprise, it worked perfectly! I could even extract the file! Hell, I could even work with paths >340 characters!
So... I'm going through all of the 70 missing files and copying them. with 7zip. because it's the only bloody thing that works. ffs
Third-party utilities work better than Microsoft's official fixes. gg.
...
On a related note, I totally feel like that person from http://xkcd.com/763 right now ;;21 -
Since I was little I was fascinated by club light shows I saw on TV shows. I just couldn't find out how they made light react to sound, which were two completely unrelated things to me back then. But I wasn't dumb and somehow figured out that if I hooked some low energy fairy lights to my amp and turned the bass up, they would lightup to the beat.
3 fried fairy lights and angry parents for to loud music later I swore to myself that I would someday build something that could light up my whole room and react to the music I was playing.
I started coding about the age 13 (turned 20 a month ago) with some old school bat scripts. But I wanted something that would generate a .exe so I googled and ended up installing Visual Studio Express (again angry parents for installing without asking) and started copying my first VB.Net program together. From there no one could stop me. I wanted to archive something with an application and googled until I found what I needed and learned to code this way.
I learned writing decent vb.net code and itvwas about this time I came into contact with IRC. I lurked arround there and this is were I came into contact with Linix servers, because I wanted to code IRC (eggdrop) bots, so I learned TCL and got used to Linux. Time passed and I ended uo being a Global OP on some network back then.
I did go further, coded Minecraft Mods, thus Java, changed back to C#, learned PHP and started setting things up on my VPS, Mails server, web server, etc.
Nowadays I work as a Systemadmin / Developer Hybrid, earning my first real money doing what I love to do and guess what? In the meantime I proved myself I can accomplish what I wanted as kid. I bought some Club LED DMX capital lights and programmed a controller for them which can control them in C#, but in a way I can run it on my raspi using mono. I also coded a client which runs on windows which uses some native libraries to calculate the dominant color of the shown picture in realtime (Handels 24fps 1080p) and uses the lights as ambient light, like you see them behind TVs sometimes.
The same app uses Bass.NET and an algorithm to dedect a beat in realtime and switches the light colors. Exactly what I wanted as akid, but better.
I can even control the lights via the new Google Assistant and/or Tasker.
Feels fcking good.
Some of my work lies on github among other, mostly trash: https://github.com/Kimmax - didn't updated there in a while tho.
I plan on writing a new free opensource plugin based modular home automatication server and pretty sure could use some helping hands..
I don't know why I wrote all this, just felt like it.
Also: first Rant
Please don't kill me for errors in the text, I'm to lazy to read through it again right now :P8 -
So Windows XP source allegedly got leaked... And a bunch of other MS's OS (and other) files
https://limetorrents.info/Microsoft...
```
ms_dos_3_30_oem_adaptation_kit_source_code.7z - 591.99 KB
ms_dos_6_0_source_code.7z - 10.7 MB
nt5src.7z - 2.37 GB
torrent description.txt - 6.63 KB
windows_10_shared_source_kit.7z - 74.76 MB
windows_2000_source_code.7z - 122.35 MB
windows_ce_3_platform_builder_source_code.7z - 638.69 KB
windows_ce_4_2_081231.7z - 3.44 MB
windows_ce_5_121231.7z - 4.92 MB
windows_embedded_7_2014M12.7z - 12.9 MB
windows_embedded_ce_6_r3_170331.7z - 8.11 MB
windows_embedded_compact_2013_2015M09.7z - 93.17 MB
windows_nt_3_5_source_code.7z - 101.76 MB
windows_nt_4_source_code.7z - 106.22 MB
windows_source_bg.png - 134.83 KB
windows_source_bg.svg - 55.03 KB
```17 -
I am so mad, I have no words for how fucking much I hate ever having to work or pass work to other incompetent developers or teams, what a fucking waste of time and resources.
After handing off the frontend - for the client to find some team, that would do it in the short time and budget he needs (multiple developers, more fast, much good), he found a team that seemed to be alright for the job and seemed alright to me too, now maybe a month or two later, the client contacts me, that they fucked something up and if I could talk to them.
The email I then received from them seriously made me speechles, mad and sad, all at same time, I spent multiple upon multiple hours, getting a very good readable documentation up (markdown with TOC, properly rendered headers, bulletpoints, all that shit), with all files, all services used, all credentials, even converted all ssh keys into putty ppk format, in case the developers are using windows and are too dumb to do it themselves, nginx configs, it had seriously everything, even too much to list.
They somehow managed to fuck up the entire server, while attempting to "add ssh keys themselves", EVEN FUCKING THOUGH I have included all the keys they need, all the hosting credentials, everything, yet they decided to fuck with shit themselves and completely annihilate the server in the process (HOW?!), so not even the webserver works anymore.
I am fucking speechless, I made it so fucking easy to gather all info and files they need, all properly put into well named folders, along the documentation in an archive and they somehow managed to nuke the fucking server, while attempting to add ssh keys?!
If you don't know how to config a server, then don't fucking touch it and just use everything, that got served to you on a fucking silver platter.
---
I'll just instantly answer the most annoying comment, that somebody could come up with: "why didn't you do it yourself?"
Because in a perfect world, a fully managed team, can do much more than a single developer can, especially in the same timeframe and from what I heard of said client, atleast they did something in terms of developing the system. (which surprises me, considering it's the same people that nuked a server, while trying to add ssh keys)5 -
This is a story of how I did a hard thing in bash:
I need to extract all files with extension .nco from a disk. I don't want to use the GUI (which only works on windows). And I don't want to install any new programs. NCO files are basically like zip files.
Problem 1: The file headers (or something) is broken and 7zip (7z) can only extract it if has .zip extension
Problem 2: find command gives me relative to the disk path and starts with . (a dot)
Solution: Use sed to delete dot. Use sed to convert to full path. Save to file. Load lines from file and for each one, cp to ~/Desktop/file.zip then && 7z e ~/Desktop/file.zip -oOutputDir (Extract file to OutputDir).
Problem 3: Most filenames contain a whitespace. cp doesn't work when given the path wrapped in quotes.
Patch: Use bash parameter substitution to change whitespace to \whitespace.
(Note: I found it easier to apply sed one after another than to put it all in one command)
Why the fuck would anyone compress 345 images into their own archive used by an uncommon windows-only paid back-up tool?
Little me (12 years old) knowing nothing about compression or backup or common software decided to use the already installed shitty program.
This is a big deal for me because it's really the first time I string so many cool commands to achieve desired results in bash (been using Ubuntu for half a year now). Funny thing is the images uncompressed are 4.7GB and the raw files are about 1.4GB so I would have been better off not doing anything at all.
Full command:
find -type f -name "*.nco" |
sed 's/\(^./\)/\1/' |
sed 's/.*/\/media\/mitiko\/2011-2014_1&/' > unescaped-paths.txt
cat unescaped-paths.txt | while read line; do echo "${line// /\\ }" >> escaped-paths.txt; done
rm unescaped-paths.txt
cat escaped-paths.txt | while read line; do (echo "$line" | grep -Eq .*[^db].nco) && echo "$line" >> paths.txt; done
rm escaped-paths.txt
cat paths.txt | while read line; do cp $line ~/Desktop/file.zip && 7z e ~/Desktop/file.zip -oImages >/dev/null; done3 -
That feeling when you ask someone to send you an archived files and he/she sends you *.rar file, not *.tar.gz, not *.zip.2
-
(a slide acoustic guitar plays on the background and the cowboy starts speaking)
It was a dry october day, back in good old 2017. I had this job from a client that I never met and was doing some coding for money.
After days of no sleep, no food and no rest, I finally decided to take a nap so I paused my music.
It was at this moment I found out my machine was making funny noises. Like a dingo makin' a run from it's enemies with a whelping noise.
Clicked on my computer and tried to find an ol' file from the archive drive but the machine won't let me, sayin' the disk ain't ready yet.
I tried disk manager, disk scanner, whatever the tools at my disposal all in vain. Then I said what the hell, I'll just restart my machine and it'll be alright.
The machine rebooted but the disk was gone. It was dead like a deer I ran over. I was upset, but not aware of the calamity headin' my way.
In just a few days my other 2 disks died suddenly. The loss of data, all the effort, none of them mattered. I felt numb and decided it was time for a fresh start.
Plugged in a Windows install disk, started the sequence, a screen came up askin' me which damned and alive disk I wanna install the fresh OS. I had two same make and model SSD disks, chose the one thinkin' it was the Windows drive, hell it wasnt... It was with all "my documents", "downloads", "pictures" folders and now I had two SSD drives with two Windows installations and nothing else.
The folks in town took a dab at me for months, even the bartender of the salloon refused to give me a drink. Sayin' it was a matter of reputation...
Turned out the bastard who fried my disks was the Madde Dog PSU Tannen who had a bad temper so here I am, tellin' my story to milk breathers and cherishing old days of data...3 -
I am newbie to Ubuntu from windows
.
.
.
I installed nodejs in windows with few seconds
.
.
.
But here ubuntu i trying since last one week.
.
.
Error Posted on github (https://github.com/nodejs/...)
.
and
.
askUbuntu(http://askubuntu.com/questions/...)
.
.
No solution thinking back to windows.......................................12 -
So yesterday, when I went to someone else in our office to look how their pc build ended up, I decided to help them setting up windows
All pcs there are on windows 7 except for personal laptops, which I left home because I rarely need it there my colleague was working on his laptop though, so I was obviously gonna use a Windows 7 PC.
I didn't want to use 3rd party software, not because I'd think they're bad, just because I did it with the cmd a few times in the past, so I erased the USB stick and made it bootable, after that I remembered that win 7 can't mount drives without 3rd party software, but tried stuff from the Internet about xconfig, it didn't work (also I got a bit off track trying to automate some stuff of it with a .bat file cause I got tired of doing it manually)
After hassling with it for 2 hours I told my colleague to give me his laptop, mounted the drive and copied the stuff over, plugged it into the other pc and started the setup.
What annoys me is that I didn't even think of just opening the archive with 7zip or something and moving it over, or using Windows 10 in the first place...
Further, I tried to make a multiboot USB stick with different OSs today, 15 minutes of Google and a bit less for actually getting the stuff on the drive and I was done, my stupidity and stubbornness won't get in the way of installing Windows does anymore...