I need a few updates myself

Is anyone here with ASD? How are you cope with communication with colleagues? At the moment I'm junior dev and need ask and discuss more, but it's difficult to explain what I mean and make correct questions

Hello everyone, found this place recently, decided to bore you with one (or many) Navy story... tech Navy story. I'll start from the end.
Little backstory: I've deployed a simple domain setup on the ship I served, nothing fancy, a server, a switch, 10 computers, all Windows (details on that at another rant). I enter the ship Monday morning, and the XO tells me that he can't access his online folders.
OK, I say, I'll get to it. I fire up my laptop, try to RDP to the server (I know, I know, burn me at the stake later) no connection. WTF? Is the service down? I try pinging. No luck. I tried pinging the switch. OK. Looking at the switch admin panel, I see the server's port is dead. "OK, probably the cable." (we have old ethernet cables)
So, I drag my ass over to the server (same room with ship comms) with the cable tester to confirm that. What do I see?
The IMBECILES had pulled the plug from the server so that they could charge their mobile phones. I literally slammed my head against the door (calming exercise in case of spontaneous murder impulses - the things you learn at the Academy). My CO was nearby, and lucky for the guys, he heard me yell at them, while throwing mobiles and chargers around.
"But we thought it was OK, we just wanted to charge our-"
I kid you not, I reached for the firefighter's axe.
My CO grabbed me by the collar and dragged me to his room. I explained to him (between two cigarettes) that we MUST get a UPS and a server cabinet (budget constraints in the military are something that will give you people nightmares, trust me). I carefully explained to him that unless we got those, nothing would prevent the next moron from destroying confidential data and me from murdering him.
I plugged in and booted the server, after installing a multi socket extension. Two days after, surprise surprise, the server was off again. That was the first time I opened the door to the CO's room with a low kick. I must have looked like a psycho on drugs, he gave approval for the purchase in twenty seconds flat.
After that, I installed the UPS and the cabinet. Everything went inside, from the UPS to the very plugs. Just a locked box with cables coming out.
One of the guys came to my room, and asked if I could unlock the cabinet so that they could plug a "device" they needed.
I actually reached for my folding knife.
Disclaimer: The story above is TRUE. Even the almost violent parts.

I'm planning on stopping my mail server but I don't know to which service I should move, I have a custom domain that I need to link, for example Google cloud apps where I can forward emails, but of course I don't want to use Google.

Any recommendations?

Before an interview prepare a list of questions for them, they expect it!
My list to give inspiration:

Describe your company culture? - if the response is buzzword heavy, avoid.

What’s the oldest technology still in use? - all companies have legacy systems but some are worse than others

Describe your agile process? - a few companies I’ve interviewed with said they are agile but it’s actually kanban

Are developers involved with customers?- if they trust you to talk to customers you can infer trust to do your job ( I’m sure others will disagree)

Describe your development environment?- do they have such a thing as dev, test and prod?

These are the only ones I can remember but should give others a bit of inspiration I hope 😄

Boss: "Could you join the new DevOps team for a week or two, for some coaching?"

Me: "I'd rather watch you masturbate furiously in a corner of the office while you cry over your ex boyfriend"

Boss: "Yeah... that's why I ask you. You are the only one brave enough to watch"

Me: *Sigh* "But I don't know shit about what DevOps does, I'm a DBA. I've told you the difference a million times. Can't we just douse it in gasoline and set it on fire?"

Boss: "What?"

Me: "Not the team, the servers..."

Boss, imitating Gimli: "And my ex!"

Me: "I get why he left you"

Boss: "It's funny, he was actually better with computers than me, maybe even better than you. He hated me for starting this company, told me I was just chasing money instead of ideals. He just isn't grown up enough to see that there is more to the world than computer games, brewing beer, maker festivals and gay bars, that you need to take responsibility... Maybe it just never works out between managers and geeks..."

Me: "Indeed. The difference in competence is too large"

Boss: "Ugh. You are like straight version of him... but will you at least take a look?"

Me: "Fine, unzip your pants..."

Boss: "No, not that... you need to teach DevOps this docking thing, with the parallel stuff, and the horizontal growth"

Me: "Damn I really hope we're talking about servers now... Do you mean Docker?"

Boss: "That's it. They want to learn how to dock on the Windows servers. They reserved two 4xlarge on AWS. Is that enough for docking?"

Me: ...

Me: ...

Me: "You know what. I'm going back to hug my DB designs, and wash my brain with some queries. Then I'll return here to burn everything to the ground. There is no hope for you left"

Boss: "That's what he said"

Me: "You're using that meme wrong"

Boss: "OK. So what if you just stay on DB management, and I'll just give you the budget to recruit a new DevOps lead and pay for training?"

Me: "That would work"

Boss: "Why are you grinning?"

Me: "Because I have your ex's phone number"

Respect ++

we're all savages in the end ...

Okay guys, this is it!

Today was my final day at my current employer. I am on vacation next week, and will return to my previous employer on January the 2nd.

So I am going back to full time C/C++ coding on Linux. My machines will, once again, all have Gentoo Linux on them, while the servers run Debian. (Or Devuan if I can help it.)

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So what have I learned in my 15 months stint as a C++ Qt5 developer on Windows 10 using Visual Studio 2017?

1. VS2017 is the best ever.
Although I am a Linux guy, I have owned all Visual C++/Studio versions since Visual C++ 6 (1999) - if only to use for cross-platform projects in a Windows VM.

2. I love Qt5, even on Windows!
And QtDesigner is a far better tool than I thought. On Linux I rarely had to design GUIs, so I was happily surprised.

3. GUI apps are always inferior to CLI.
Whenever a collegue of mine and me had worked on the same parts in the same libraries, and hit the inevitable merge conflict resolving session, we played a game: Who would push first? Him, with TortoiseGit and BeyondCompare? Or me, with MinTTY and kdiff3?
Surprise! I always won! 😁

4. Only shortly into Application Development for Windows with Visual Studio, I started to miss the fun it is to code on Linux for Linux.
No matter how much I like VS2017, I really miss Code::Blocks!

5. Big software suites (2,792 files) are interesting, but I prefer libraries and frameworks to work on.

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For future reference, I'll answer a possible question I may have in the future about Windows 10: What did I use to mod/pimp it?

1. 7+ Taskbar Tweaker
https://rammichael.com/7-taskbar-tw...

2. AeroGlass
http://www.glass8.eu/

3. Classic Start (Now: Open-Shell-Menu)
https://github.com/Open-Shell/...

4. f.lux
https://justgetflux.com/

5. ImDisk
https://sourceforge.net/projects/...

6. Kate
Enhanced text editor I like a lot more than notepad++. Aaaand it has a "vim-mode". 👍
https://kate-editor.org/

7. kdiff3
Three way diff viewer, that can resolve most merge conflicts on its own. Its keyboard shortcuts (ctrl-1|2|3 ; ctrl-PgDn) let you fly through your files.
http://kdiff3.sourceforge.net/

8. Link Shell Extensions
Support hard links, symbolic links, junctions and much more right from the explorer via right-click-menu.
http://schinagl.priv.at/nt/...

9. Rainmeter
Neither as beautiful as Conky, nor as easy to configure or flexible. But it does its job.
https://www.rainmeter.net/

10 WinAeroTweaker
https://winaero.com/comment.php/...

Of course this wasn't everything. I also pimped Visual Studio quite heavily. Sam question from my future self: What did I do?

1 AStyle Extension
https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/...

2 Better Comments
Simple patche to make different comment styles look different. Like obsolete ones being showed striked through, or important ones in bold red and such stuff.
https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/...

3 CodeMaid
Open Source AddOn to clean up source code. Supports C#, C++, F#, VB, PHP, PowerShell, R, JSON, XAML, XML, ASP, HTML, CSS, LESS, SCSS, JavaScript and TypeScript.
http://www.codemaid.net/

4 Atomineer Pro Documentation
Alright, it is commercial. But there is not another tool that can keep doxygen style comments updated. Without this, you have to do it by hand.
https://www.atomineerutils.com/

5 Highlight all occurrences of selected word++
Select a word, and all similar get highlighted. VS could do this on its own, but is restricted to keywords.
https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/...

6 Hot Commands for Visual Studio
https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/...

7 Viasfora
This ingenious invention colorizes brackets (aka "Rainbow brackets") and makes their inner space visible on demand. Very useful if you have to deal with complex flows.
https://viasfora.com/

8 VSColorOutput
Come on! 2018 and Visual Studio still outputs monochromatically?
http://mike-ward.net/vscoloroutput/

That's it, folks.

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No matter how much fun it will be to do full time Linux C/C++ coding, and reverse engineering of WORM file systems and proprietary containers and databases, the thing I am most looking forward to is quite mundane: I can do what the fuck I want!
Being stuck in a project? No problem, any of my own projects is just a 'git clone' away. (Or fetch/pull more likely... 😜)
Here I am leaving a place where gitlab.com, github.com and sourceforge.net are blocked.

But I will also miss my collegues here. I know it.
Well, part of the game I guess?

#ad

If you like to hear music on YouTube, I can recommend you Headset (https://headsetapp.co), a nice little music player for the desktop, that streams directly off YouTube!

I've been using it for a year and it's really useful for while coding. Especially the ability to use the keyboard media keys!

Also there's a German translation since yesterday! (Done by me :D)

Anybody read the Game Programming Gems series? Are they any good? Are there better alternatives? I'm thinking of getting one or two but have no idea if they're actually worth it or whether they're outdated or were never very good to begin with.

Atom is free.
Visual Studio Code is free.
Jetbrains IntelliJ IDEA Ultimate is $500 per year.

Atom has Teletype.
Visual Studio / Code has LiveShare.
Jetbrains IntelliJ has "Can you send me over the file and I'll try to figure out the issue without any sort of context?"

Customised my Ubuntu VM using
I3wm, polybar, Compton, conky, rofi,
And zsh shell !

The theme is inspired by unixporn subreddit post!

Btw it took 4days completely to do

FIrst look at chromes new UI and all I could think was ewww...

That's my boy rocking i3 with arch assisted by a mini boye(bottom) for reading and note making assisted by a slightly larger boye(left) rocking arch with deepin desktop for serious work and style on the go.

Just changed some registry stuff, I'm connected with Wifi and LAN at the same time now. It's still shit but actually better than before :D

Add a DWORD-Value (32 Bit) into Computer\HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\WOW6432Node\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\WcmSvc\GroupPolicy ... that's it

Thinking about installing a Linux distro on my home computer as the second OS. Any recommendations on which distro to use? I'm not a total beginner, I just haven't used any desktop environments for Linux yet. I'm currently having a look at Arch + Budgie - any previous experiences?

No am not!!

!rant
I've launched a small new project at https://2048.run

It will let you play 2048 (the game) over SSH or Telnet.

Connection Details
ssh play@2048.run
telnet 2048.run

Use username/password "play" to play the game.

Have fun!

anyone using I3 gaps if so could you share your configs cheers guys

New Feature of Facebook? :D

Rust with rocket framework or Golang ? What would you prefer ?

I just wanted to give a shout out to the best damn API tool for the mac.

Paw - https://paw.cloud/

It is worth every penny! Simply the hands-down best API exploration tool I have ever used.

No disrespect to Postman or Insomnia but they cannot compare to this glorious tool.

Client: Hey, you're the IT guy right?
Me: Hey, how can I help?
Client: Yeah for some reason I've lost power to my computer
Me: *Checks power, all computers are down due to a power cut*
Me: You'll have to contact your power supplier as you've lost power to all computers and lights.
Client: What, but the computers are not working right? - that's you're job not mine
Me: That's not how it works.
Client: Fix this or I'll bill you for the loss of money we've encountered during this and report this to your boss.
Me: How about I bill you for my time and advice and inform by boss that you tried to blame me for a power cut.
Client: You can try.
Me: *walks off and puts time in the ticket, requests purchasing to send an invoice*

2 Days later:
The client does not pay the invoice.
Me: (phone call) Hi, an invoice has been sent to you and we haven't received payment yet.
Client: were not paying that, you broke our power and made our computers break
Me: null

I have this super comfortable OpenSUSE Tumbleweed shirt that I really like, but my girlfriend does not. She says it makes me look too geeky.

Fine, I wore it to the gym and made new Linux friends there. So I guess I won in the end.

This is so fucking, fucking annoying.

Client (through ticket system): here's new nameservers my domain has to use, please enter them thank you!"
Me: you can easily do that yourself! *gives link to extremely fucking easy click-done tutorial*
Client: oh but I'm not technical, could you please do it anyways?

HAVE YOU EVEN FUCKING LOOKED AT THE LINK?!

THIS SHIT HAPPENS EVERY GODDAMN DAY.

Working in the IT Department is just funny man. Sometimes I wonder if I'm dumb, too smart to answer these dumb questions or these clients are just asking questions they already have answers to that I don't.

Client: Hey, can you please give X access to Y's Dropbox? He gets error saying he doesn't have access to the file.

Me: Uhh, you have to share a link to the specific file you want to share with X. Then only he can access it.

Client: Can you send him the link?

Me: Uhhhh, what link?

Client: The link to the file.

Me: Who created the file you want to share?

Client: My boss did. And he wants me to send the link to X. But I don't have the link so he said to check with IT.

Me (in my mind): WTF!!!!

Me: Ok, ask your boss to share the link to the file he created with you then you can send it to Y. He can also send it to Y directly himself. IT doesn't have and has no idea of what file your boss created. Only your boss knows.

Client: Ok, hold on let me check with him..

Client gets back on the phone.. "he said he deleted the file".

Me: Well, there's no file to share here.

Client: Can you find it?

Me: Call Dropbox.

Client: do you have his number?

Me: Who?

Client: Dropbox..

At this point I started laughing.. 😂😂😂🤣🤣

Me: Dropbox is a company.

Client: Ok, thank you. I'll call Dropbox.

At this point, I'm wondering. If this client thought Dropbox was person, then what did she mean by her initial question? 🤔

Can this be real life? This happened less than an hour ago, and going home now still confused about this whole situation. 😂😂

CS Professor: “What M word is the black hole to all productivity?”

Student: “Management”

CS Professor: “Was going to say meetings but that’s better”

Tried an ad blocker for the first time yesterday. Well what do ya know? Websites I use will not let me access them unless I turn it off. I KNEW something like this would happen. When they were first coming out a few years ago, I said to myself "If everyone is going to be blocking ads, how will we be able to go to these sites for free?"

I expected the worst. I thought they'd put free websites behind a pay wall, much like ad-free mobile applications I would make. Thank GOD that didn't happen. This system is a lot more fair in my opinion. I'm just glad they don't do the same with popup-blockers. Then we would have an issue.

In all seriousness, as annoying as some websites are with their trashy, misleading, or fake ads, they (kinda) have to be there in order for devs to make money and for consumers to be somewhat happy. That is why I personally will not use ad blockers.

So true 😂